Wonderland
by La Guera
Summary: One day, Don Flack fell through the looking glass.
1. Down the Rabbit Hole

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

Detectives Stabler, Tutuola, and Greene are property of NBC and Dick Wolf Productions. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

All references to magic and magical ability come courtesy of J.K Rowling and Harry Potter. The latter is the property of the former, as well as Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: **This is a work of complete and utter crack and contains an OFC. If that offends thee, please exit to the rear and stay in your lane. There is no need to pee in my pool. Also contains spoilers for CSI:NY S2. Read at your own risk.**

**All 8 chapters of this story have been completed and will be posted as often as possible. **

Don Flack sat numbly in a chair beside the bed and blinked molishly at the harsh hospital lighting. His stunned brain kept insisting that he was at the wrong bed, that his wife was in the next bed over, but then his eyes would find the empty, rumpled sheets where she should have been, and the world would slalom dangerously under his feet.

"Mrs. Gruberman," Stella was saying beside him, crisp and efficient, "What can you tell me about the young woman who was your roommate?"

Mrs. Gruberman was a frail woman of eighty-five, and according to the nurse they had interviewed earlier, she was in the last stages of renal failure. She was jaundiced and thin, and her joints were swollen with retained fluid. She was also nearly blind.

"Oh, the young pregnant girl?" Her voice was bright and clear.

"Yes, ma'am."

Mrs. Gruberman coughed delicately into her cupped hand. "Oh, well, let's see. She seemed sweet enough. Came in two weeks ago with her young husband. Didn't seem too happy, as I remember. There was a lot of crying."

Stella blinked. "Crying?" she repeated, and cast a sidelong glance at him.

"Oh, yes. She didn't want to stay here. She pleaded with him to take her home, but he insisted. She cried for a while after he was gone, but by the next morning, she must have decided it would do her no good, because she was mostly all right. Even talked a little."

"What did she say?" Stella prompted.

"That her name was Rebecca, and that she was a mathematician. My husband, Edgar, was a mathematician, you know. Spent a lifetime in the garage with his theories and algorithms. Always smelled like chalk, too. Breathing it in for forty years is probably what killed him. I told him-,"

"Mrs. Gruberman," Stella interrupted. "About Rebecca?"

"Oh. It was her first baby, you know. She was very excited. She was always rubbing her belly. Said the baby was active like his father; never gave her a minute's rest. That was why she was going to name him for him."

The casual revelation struck him like a fist, and he sat back abruptly in his chair. Suddenly, he was breathing through gauze, and the world had taken on a wavering, astigmatic sheen. He squeezed his knees until they throbbed and bit his tongue until copper flooded his mouth.

_She was always talkin' about namin' the baby after you, but you never took it seriously. You figured it for a bit of sweet flattery, and that when the time came, she'd name him somethin' respectable, like John or Michael or Robert. Just as long as it wasn't exotic and unpronounceable. Aloysius or Clymenestra or Llewellyn P. Jackoff._

_In truth, you wanted her to name him anything _but _Don Flack, III. Yeah, it was your name, but it was also your father's, and that was a hard legacy to carry. You'd shouldered it all your life, and while you'd made your own, the price was too high. You wanted better for your own son, didn't want him crushed by the weight of his past. He didn't have to be a cop. He could be a doctor or a dentist, or maybe he'd be like his Ma and show talent for numbers. He could be an astronaut and touch the moon, like you used to dream._

_Maybe you shoulda listened to her more, _his father grunted. _It's not for lack'a her talkin'. She talked all the time, and you used to listen once upon a time, but then you got tapped for a spot on the task force chasin' that serial sicko, and you put the professional blinders on. You ate, breathed, and slept the case. Soon, you were comin' home at four in the mornin', and then you stopped comin' home at all. You slept on the hard, industrial cots of the rack room and called Rebecca to bring you changes of clothes, your toothbrush and deodorant, and a shaving kit. You barely had time for a quick, impatient peck on the lips and an absent rub of her belly before you were off playin' Sir fuckin' Galahad again. That's why you put her here._

That wasn't fair. In fact, it was fucking bullshit. He hadn't put Rebecca here for expediency; he had put her here because he'd had no choice. By her seventh month, she was so heavy and ponderous with his baby that she could no longer stand upright for even a moment without swaying dangerously on her swollen feet. More than once, he'd had to catch her before she fell while pivoting from her chair to the toilet.

_You came to your decision after a particularly nasty near-fall, standin' in the bathroom at five in the mornin' in nothin' but your boxers and holdin' your tremblin' wife by the forearms. She'd nearly broken her fall with the baby, and all you could think as you stood there with the cold tile burnin' your sweaty feet and your heart lodged in your pinhole throat was, _What if I hadn't come home tonight? What if I'd stayed at the station house? I never woulda known until she didn't answer the phone or show up with a change of clothes.

_You couldn't get the image of her lyin' on the floor in a pool of blood and amniotic fluid outta your head. You imagined her deliverin' the baby on the bathroom floor, and him screamin' his brand-new lungs out while she bled to death. You kept envisionin' comin' home to find them in a tacky puddle. She'd be dead from blood loss, thighs smeared with blood dryin' to sticky maroon, and your Junior'd be dead from exposure and hypothermia, little face contorted and blue, miniature fist tucked beneath his stiffening chin._

_The thought of losin' your family while you were out chasin' the wolves without the walls was more than you could stand, so you made up your mind. You didn't mention it to her that night because you knew how she would react, and she was already dazed with adrenaline and weak with shock, so you helped her into bed and stroked the rounded dome of her belly until her fluttering lids succumbed to sleep._

_You broached the subject the next mornin'. She was pourin' a spoonful of sugar into your coffee when you said it, and she froze. Just froze. A rabbit before the predatory eyes of a fox. Her head dipped involuntarily, as if she was duckin' an invisible blow, and her nostrils flared. She dropped the spoon onto the counter with a wet, metallic plink, and droplets of coffee stippled the wall behind the stove like cast-off blood spatter._

_She shook her head. _No. No way.

_You launched into your argument for hospitalization, laying out all the rational reasons she should go. You told her she'd be more comfortable there, that she'd have someone to look after her all the time. You pointed out that the delivery rooms were just a few floors up if Junior decided not to wait until his due date. When the time came, there wouldn't be any mad rush to the hospital in the middle of the night; it'd be an easy transition from one room to another. It all sounded so neat there in the kitchen, so practical._

No, _she repeated adamantly. _No, no, no. I won't go. _It was brittle, jagged with burgeoning panic._

_She gave her own speech then, about virulent germs and long hours of monotony. She insisted that to put her in a hospital was de facto imprisonment. Once there, she told you, her back to you and her knuckles white and trembling on the edge of the countertop, she would no longer be Rebecca Flack, autonomous human being with rights. She would be a quarrelsome patient who did not know her own mind. The nurses would come with their injections and platitudes, and if she resisted their regimen, there would be restraints and sedatives. Her voice steadily rose in pitch as she described the horrors that awaited her, until it teetered delicately on the cusp of hysteria._

_You could only stare at the back of her head in mystified disbelief. You knew she had had bad experiences in the hospital as a kid and had a strong aversion to their sterile, ugly walls-hell, you were no great fan of the men in white coats yourself, as a matter of fact-but you had never suspected that her terror ran so deep. Your wife was the smartest, sanest person you had ever known, yet there she sat, shiverin' like a child in the thrall of the boogeyman and ravin' like the paranoid schizophrenics you used to corral as a rookie beat cop._

_You couldn't very well tell her that she sounded like the crazies down on Broadway, so you ambled behind her, crossed your arms over her chest, and planted a kiss on the crown of her head. You promised her that it would be all right, that you would make sure they took care of her and listened to her. She had been a child when she had been at their mercy, but she was an adult now, and it would be different. She laughed at that, a hard, mirthless caw, and shook her head._

No, it won't, _she said._

_And still she refused. _

_You wheedled and cajoled and tried fruitlessly to issue husbandly edicts, all of which were to no avail, and then you became a dirty-fightin' bastard. _

All right, fine, _you huffed at her rigid back. _You want me to take one in the line because I'm too exhausted to think straight after takin' you to the bathroom seven fuckin' times a night, you go right ahead and stay here. I'm bettin' your precious ego'll be great consolation when my fellow officer hands you my flag.

_The sound that came outta her mouth has been ringin' in your ears ever since you got the call this mornin' that she'd disappeared from her bed sometime between the six A.M. bed check and breakfast, when the candystriper in charge of bringin' the trays found her gone. It was the same sound a perp makes after takin' a baton to the ribs or a knee to the balls, breathless and agonized, a dull vibration you feel in your solar plexus as you're haulin' 'em to their feet. When she finally turned to face you, one hand was cupped over her belly as if she was soothin' away the unexpected shock of a blow, and you've never forgotten the way she looked at you, as if you'd ripped off her underwear and fucked her without askin'._

Fine, _she said dully. _I'll go. _She rolled toward the bedroom, and you started after her, but she said. _I'll do it. Just drink your coffee.

_Twenty minutes later, she was waiting by the front door with a suitcase on her lap. You pushed her to the department car and settled her inside, and when she was comfortable, you asked her if she wanted to grab some breakfast first. You'd take her for orange juice and Eggs Benedict and fruit salad if she wanted, but she just shook her head and kept both hands curled around the sturdy, vinyl handle of the suitcase._

_Now that you'd gotten your way, you felt guilty about how you got it, so you filled the frosty silence of the car with small talk, tried to make her smile. You talked about the gorgeous weather and the dumb rookie down the precinct who got blasted in the face with his own mace 'cause he pointed it the wrong way in a scuffle with a skel. You patted her hands and swore up and down that it wouldn't be bad. You'd bring her books and magazines and puzzles, and you'd sort things out with her department chair at NYU. She wouldn't have to worry. You'd come every day after shift, task force be damned; you'd flash the badge if you had to. She wouldn't be alone this time. _

_She never said a word._

_She was all right until they snapped the blue plastic ID bracelet around her wrist. Then she started to hyperventilate, and a minute later she was sobbin' and clawin' at the bracelet, beggin' you to take it off._

No, _she shrieked, and scrabbled at it with spasmin' fingers. _No, no. Please, no. I don't want to. I've changed my mind. Don, please. Please don't make me stay here. Just take me home. Or…or take me to the precinct. I can stay in the rack room. I won't bother you, I swear. Oh, God, baby, please.

_You were convinced that if she coulda gotten on her hands and knees to beg, she woulda. She was cryin' so hard, she was gaggin' on the snot drippin' into the back of her throat, and all the while, she was jerkin' on that ID band like it was a burnin' shackle pressed into her skin and not a loose circle of plastic and paper tellin' who she was and what she was there for._

_You almost relented then because seein' her that way scared the shit outta you. Rebecca was a jealous guardian of her dignity, and if she was willin' to cast it aside in public, then somethin' must be seriously fucked-up. But each time you thought about gatherin' her up and walkin' out, you'd see her lyin' on the floor with the baby blue and cold between her bloody legs. So you hardened your heart and opted to listen to the admissions nurse, who came around the desk and assured you that sometimes pregnant women became highly irrational because of hormone fluctuations._

_You got her into the room and helped her into the bed, and the whole time you were easing her legs onto the bed and underneath the flimsy covers, she was gulpin' air and cryin' it out again and clingin' to your sleeves and to the lapels of your coat. The nurse came in and offered to sedate her, and Rebecca twisted on the bed and tried to get up. You rethought your decision again, because it was eerily close to what she said would happen, but you swallowed your misgivin's and put her back in bed._

_It took you twenty minutes, but you soothed her with whispers and caresses instead of sedatives. You sat on the edge of the bed and brushed her tear and sweat-dampened hair from her forehead, and you even laid the New York on as thick as you could because your New York mouth was one of the reasons she fell in love with you. You told her over and over that you loved her, really loved her, doll. All she had to do was get through the next four weeks, and then they could bring Junior home and learn about bein' a family together. _

_It worked like a dream until you made to leave, and then all your carefully-laid tenderness unraveled and she was crying again, pleadin' not to be left in the bed. She clung to your wrists so fiercely that she left bleedin', red weals when you extricated yourself. They stung and smarted all the way home, and as you clung to the handrail in the subway car, they throbbed beneath the skin, like she'd embedded infection there. You found droplets of blood on your cuffs from where the wounds had wept, and that broke your heart more than all the screamin' she had done in the hospital 'cause they looked so much like tears. The stains weren't bad; in fact, they were hardly noticeable, and Rebecca probably coulda gotten 'em out with soda water and some lemon juice, but they inspired a guilty nausea the longer you looked at 'em, so you wadded up the shirt and threw it into the steel gullet of the trash chute._

_You were true to your word about seein' her every day for the first week. You brought her sunflowers and black-eyed Susans and arranged 'em around the room, and then you'd sit by the bed and rub her belly while she watched TV or just lost herself in the warmth of your palms. Sometimes you talked, but a lot of the time, she was content to let you feel the baby movin' and let you play by tappin' different parts of her belly to see if you could make him turn toward your hand. She still wasn't happy about bein' cooped up in the friggin' hospital bed all day, but she was makin' the best of it, and she perked up whenever you came into the room._

_Then you caught a big lead on that task-force case, and all your noble intentions got shot to shit. You called her the first night you couldn't make it, but the crushed disappointment was acid against raw skin, so you found a reason not to call the second night or the third, and anyway, by then, you were three days from your last shower and stinkin' up a car on a stakeout. You sat in the passenger seat with a cup of bitter, scorched, convenience-store coffee tucked between your knees and a pair of high-powered binoculars in one hand, and you watched the abandoned warehouse in the meat-packing district. You swallowed your guilt along with your coffee, and you told yourself that as soon as you collared the perp who was rapin' women and hackin' 'em to pieces with a hacksaw, you were goin' to the captain and requestin' leave. You hadn't taken a sick day since you hit the streets, and all the unused personal time you'd accrued probably meant you could stay at home for the first six months of your son's life. You wouldn't go that far, of course, but you would go straight to the hospital and dote on your girl around the clock until she delivered and for several days after._

_Three days later, you felt like the world's biggest unwashed asshole when it turned out that your big suspect was just a kosher butcher tryin' to make a little under the table by sellin' the scraps from his first job to some cheap-ass restaurateur who wasn't gonna let a little thing like botulism stand in the way of his profit margin. Those parcels you thought were body parts were hunks of veal and beef past the sell-by date. Your big bust went up in smoke, and you and the rest of the team had egg on your faces in front of a bunch'a SWAT guys called outta bed at three-thirty in the mornin'._

_Six days'a work, and instead'a goin' to your girl a conquerin' hero, you had squat to show for it except a near-terminal case of ass funk and the name of a restaurant you should never, ever visit. You imagined the look on your pregnant wife's face as you explained to her that you'd blown her off for six days to nab a guy whose terrible crime against humanity netted him a $500 fine. It made you wanna laugh and cry at the same time, and flowers weren't gonna cut it this time. You vowed that you'd go to the hospital the next day armed with chocolate-covered cherries and a bottle of cocoa butter for her dry-skinned stomach. You'd feed her the cherries and give her a backrub, and when her hot, tense muscles were malleable putty beneath your fingers, you'd smear the cool lotion over her stomach and mouth your Junior's kicking feet._

_And then the call came._

_And on the seventh day, God rested, _he thought nonsensically, and dug his thumbs into his knee joints to stop the room from spinning.

He'd been at the 33rd precinct, hunkered at a table with the rest of the taskforce, poring over the case files in search of overlooked clues and trying to live down the massive waste of manpower and money his first foray had been. Elliot Stabler had been opposite him at the table, wiping a smear of jelly from the corner of his mouth and flipping through the autopsy report on the latest vic. His partner, Tutuola, had been beside him, chiding him not to get the fucking glaze shit all over the goddamned paperwork and thumbing through crime scene photos, brow creased in unconscious disgust.

Then his cell phone had rung, and the voice on the other end of the line had come from a great distance, as if he were taking a call from the twilight zone. He had dimly registered that the voice from beyond belonged to a nurse at Trinity, and he had gotten to his feet, sure that she was about to tell him Rebecca was in labor, but what she told him sent him back into the chair as decisively as if his hamstrings had been cut.

_Your wife has gone missing._

She might as well have told him that his heart had been stolen from his chest. For one lunatic moment, he was convinced that he was inside Stabler's jelly doughnut, mired in the gelatinous center and flailing helplessly against the sticky filling. It flooded his lungs and blinded his eyes, and when he stood a second time, it was like wading through molasses.

He could vaguely recall Stabler mirroring his movement across the table, asking if he was all right. He had moved to intercept him, but he had brushed by him with a careless bump of shoulders. Stabler had simply ceased to exist in his world. There had been voices behind him as he had left-Stabler and Tutuola calling him back, and Greene wandering in from the vending machines to ask what the hell was going on-but they were ghosts, and he had left them to their useless wailing.

He had returned to the 14th precinct and the labs without knowing how he'd gotten there, and he'd wandered the halls of the lab with the phone still clutched in his hand until he'd found Stella. He'd known instinctively that it was Stella he wanted, _needed_, because she was never rattled, a fucking Rock of Gibraltar. And because-,

_Because she owed you one. When Frankie Mala shattered her world and violated her dignity, you were the one to take the case. The brass had wanted some dipshit asswad from outta precinct, but you bulled your way into it because she was one'a yours. You did your job while preservin' the remains of her pride as best you could, and even when your official role was over, you went and sat with her to pass the time. You ran interference with the pissants at IAB, and when the good news came down, you told her in person because you didn't want her to swing in the wind any longer than she had to. You went lookin' for her because if your world imploded in the pitch darkness of a bodybag, she'd shield your spilled guts from the vicious Looky-Lous and keep the vultures away as long as she could._

She'd understood him somehow. He supposed that as a Vice cop, she'd become fluent in the various dialects of Drunk and Wasted. She'd gotten him into a chair before he'd fallen into it, and then she'd swung into action. She'd bypassed the old styrofoam-cup-of-water routine in favor of the vodka in the bottom drawer of Mac's desk, and she'd told Mac what had happened.

Mac hadn't wanted him to go with her, of course. He'd wanted him to stay at the labs, or better yet, go home and wait in case Rebecca tried to call. As a cop, Flack had known that was the smartest course of action, but for the first time in his life, being a cop brought him no comfort. He wasn't going to sit around like some sniveling, TV-husband pussy while his boys went looking for his wife in morgues and sewer grates. She was his responsibility, and he had a right to be a witness to his own death.

Mac had argued hard, but in the end, Stella had bowed to the inevitable. "Let him go, Mac," she'd said. "He needs to see it for himself. I'll keep an eye on him."

That was that. He'd followed in Stella's wake, and they'd driven to the hospital in silence. He had been grateful for the quiet, and he'd turned his wedding band around and around on his finger as though he were controlling the speed of the wheels on the SUV.

_One ring to rule them all, _he'd thought, and closed his eyes against the sudden stinging.

"She was so proud of her husband," Mrs. Gruberman was saying. "She said he was a police officer. Called him her Prince Charming."

"Oh, fuck," he managed, and pressed his knuckles to his lips. "Oh, Jesus fuck."

"Flack," Stella said sharply. "Flack, you all right?"

No, he wasn't all right. Rebecca had used that endearment once before, on their wedding day, and then, it had filled him with a beaming, giddy pride and made him blush to the roots of his hair. Now it was jagged glass and lye against his exposed heart, and it resonated inside his skull like the banging of a gavel. _Prince Charming. _What sort of prince left his lady fair in a sterile tower for six days with no one for company but a blind old crone poisoned by her own apple?

He took a ragged breath and passed his hand over his face. "I'm okay," he managed, but it was without conviction.

Stella eyed him speculatively for a moment. _Bullshit, _her eyes said, but her mouth said, "Mrs. Gruberman, did you notice anything different about Rebecca in the last few days?"

"Well, she got awfully dispirited when her young man stopped showing up," the old woman volunteered. "Still, she tried to make the best of things. Every morning, she'd make a phone call, and she'd spend the rest of the day reading or working on the puzzle he'd brought for her."

"Phone call? Do you know who she called?"

"I don't eavesdrop," Mrs. Gruberman said primly, as if Stella had accused her of farting in public. "I was brought up in a time when people had respect for one another's privacy. Nowadays, people will talk about anything to get on TV, you know. Last week, I was listening to some talk show, and a young woman was telling anyone who would listen how she'd slept with three different men in one night. It was scandalous. Why, back in my day-,"

"Back in your day," Flack interrupted before he could stop himself, "you communicated with smoke signals, and by the time guys got the message, the goods had gone cold. Now, about m-Rebecca."

Mrs. Gruberman drew up her bony shoulders in indignation. "I don't appreciate your cheek, young man," she sniffed, and he found himself wondering if she had once been a teacher.

"Yeah, well, I-," he began, but Stella cut him off.

"Mrs.-,"

"It was last night that things turned ugly," Gruberman said suddenly. "Afternoon, actually."

"How do you mean?" Stella asked, and sat forward in her chair.

"As soon as the miserable Hun in charge of this ward figured out there wasn't a police-officer husband to worry about, she stopped caring for the girl," she said bitterly. "She hasn't cared for any of us since we got here, but with a husband in law enforcement, I guess she thought it best to play it safe. With him gone…well."

"Well what?" Flack croaked. He felt faint.

Mrs. Gruberman scowled at him. "She stopped bathing her. A candy-striper came in once for a sponge bath, but her hair hadn't been washed for at least three days before she left. She was taken to the restroom twice a day. Other than that, she was left on a diaper pad."

"A diaper pad?" he repeated weakly.

"They catch piss," Mrs. Gruberman said bluntly.

He tried to imagine Rebecca, who loved wearing citrus-smelling perfumes on her wrists and throat and taking lavender baths, sitting in her own piss for hours on end. He moaned and fought the urge to punch the wall until it bled in time to his knuckles.

"I put her here because they promised they'd look after her, make her comfortable."

Mrs. Gruberman snorted. "Only if you're young and healthy to begin with. "If you're broken or old, they simply wait for you to die. Why waste time and resources on God's garbage?" she said bitterly.

"What happened yesterday afternoon?" Stella was quiet and pale, but her eyes blazed with suppressed anger.

"Rebecca got tired of lying in bed and was complaining about a pressure sore on the back of her leg. She asked if she could sit in her chair for an hour to change positions. The Hun told her no, but she kept insisting. Eventually, it got loud, and Rebecca tried to get up anyway. That was her mistake."

"What happened next?" Stella asked, but Flack thought he knew. Rebecca had told him as she stood with her back to him at their kitchen counter two weeks ago.

"The goon squad came in with a sedative," Mrs. Gruberman said simply. "Six of them held her down, they injected her with enough Haldol to stun a moose. She fought hard-I'm surprised the thrashing didn't send her into labor-but it was a losing battle from the start. She was unconscious within minutes, and even when she did come around, I doubt she knew where she was. They strapped her to the bed and left her there."

"They injected my pregnant wife with an anti-psychotic, strapped her to a bed, and left her in her own piss?" Dazed and horrified.

Mrs. Gruberman's face softened. "Yes. They did."

"What happened this morning?" Stella asked. The pen was trembling in her hand, but her mouth was set in a grim line.

"Someone came in for a moment, then left again. A few minutes later, I heard Rebecca vomiting over the side of the bed. After that, I heard her tugging on the restraints, and then I heard wheels rolling across the floor. Ten minutes after that, the door opened and shut."

"What time was this?"

"I can't say for certain, but it was before seven, because the morning news was still on. At eight-thirty, the candy-striper in charge of breakfast came in and noticed she was missing."

"They didn't call me until eleven," he told Stella.

"You're sure it was eight-thirty?"

"Absolutely. Breakfast comes the same time every morning. Whether you want it or not."

"And you're sure she vomited?"

"I was a kindergarten teacher for forty years, Detective. I know what recycled lunch sounds like."

Stella rose from her chair and went to the near side of Rebecca's bed.

_That ain't her bed, _his mind insisted stubbornly. _Her bed is at home with me._

Stella crouched, careful not to touch the floor with her hands, and bent to sniff the floor. "No trace of vomit or cleaner on this side," she murmured. She stood and crossed to the opposite side. "Oh, yeah," she said after a sniff. "I know that smell well. The nuns were devout believers in the power of Pine-Sol." She shook her head in disgust. "They fucking cleaned up before they made that phone call." She scanned the bedrail. "If she was restrained, they took that, too."

"Of course they did," Mrs. Gruberman observed contemptuously. "You think they'd want to admit they were chaining a police officer's wife to her bed?" She settled onto her sagging pillows with a phlegmatic harrumph.

"Yeah? Well, they're gonna start talking now." Stella stormed from the room, pulling her cell phone from her pocket as she went. "Mac," he heard her say as she disappeared around the corner, "we need every available man down here. I got a feeling the medical staff are gonna try to stonewall-,"

He knew he should follow her, raise a little hell of his own, but he felt curiously light inside his skin, as though his bones had been hollowed out and stuffed with cotton batting.

_I'm a straw man, _he thought stupidly, and took a hesitant, unsteady step toward the empty bed.

Looking at the room now, he couldn't fathom how he had thought his Rebecca could survive here for a month. It was cramped and sterile, and the corners were crammed with machines that sprouted tentacles of plastic tubing.

_Lovecraft had it wrong. Cthulu wasn't a cunt; it was a piece of medical equipment._

He thought then of her tiny arms, pocked and bruised with needle marks from the constant blood draws needed to monitor hormone and glucose levels. She was afraid of needles, of their greedy, merciless sting. Whenever he had taken her to Dr. Fiorello for pre-natal visits, she'd whimpered and resisted, and he'd had to cup her face in his hands and distract her with jokes and limericks and bad singing, and even with his antics to occupy her, she would cry out at the moment her skin was breached, a sharp squeak of dismayed betrayal. She would thrum with nervous energy for hours afterward, and he would watch the bruise bloom on her lily skin and be overwhelmed with a nebulous guilt that settled in the pit of his stomach like indigestion.

_Except you weren't there for the blood tests since you brought her here. She was on her own. You'd come in and find fresh marks in the crook of her elbow or the back of her hand, dark and sore and crusted with blood. By the end of the first week, her right arm was a bruise from elbow to fingertip, and when you sat on the bed, she buried her head in the crook of your neck and breathed like you were the first fresh air she'd had in days. She gripped your hand with panicky tightness, and she cried when you left. She hadn't done that since the first day, and it bothered you._

_You chalked it up to loneliness and hormones and stir-craziness, but now that it's too late, you wonder if it wasn't somethin' else entirely, if maybe not all of those marks came from the tip of a syringe. Maybe one of those plastic hoses snaked from its corner and battened onto her like an obscene umbilical cord, siphoning out her energy in a parody of the baby inside her. Maybe she knew what was happenin' and couldn't tell anyone 'cause she was afraid that no one would believe her, just like no one believed her about what it was gonna be like in here._

_She tried to tell you, _his father said. _She told you it would come down to needles and restraints. She begged and pleaded, exposed her belly like a terrified dog, and you shoulda known then that she was serious, but you brushed her off 'cause you wanted to get back on the hunt, and it'd be easier if you didn't have to worry about her. So you put your foot down and broke her back. 'S always been that way with you. Your mother and I told you not to go to that house, but you went anyway and took your sister, and your sister wound up dead. No one can tell you nothin' if you don't wanna hear it, and most of the time, it blows up in your face, and you're left to wonder what the fuck happened._

He turned in a slow circle between the beds. Maybe she had fled this room because everything in it was dead or dying. The sunflowers he had brought her seven days ago were on the dresser. They had been buoyant and bright when he'd presented them to her, heads nodding in happy agreement with their place in the world. Rebecca had commented that their black centers reminded her of wide, curious eyes, aliens touring Earth for the first time, and she'd idly toyed with the soft, vibrant petals. Now, the curious aliens were dead, their avid eyes grey and closed, and their sunshine had dimmed and fallen to the floor in a sad, brown drift. Welcome to Earth, and won't you enjoy your stay?

Mrs. Gruberman was dying, too, withering in her white soil as the flowers had done. The stink of her gradual decomposition hung in the air-piss and stale breath and rotten oranges. That she would die was beyond dispute, and yet she clung to the fraying threads of her life with brittle, dirty-nailed fingers because it was hers. She kept breathing and pissing and rotting, and every time she exhaled, the stink got worse.

_The stink ain't just from her. It's from every body that's ever died in here. Hundreds, maybe thousands. It's bled into the walls and floors and soaked into the sheets. If you turned out the harsh, fluorescent lights, the walls would be yellow, and so would the pillows and sheets. This place has dyin' in the walls, and it touches everything. It'll take you seven washes before the rotten-pork reek comes outta your clothes._

Nausea coated his guts like grease, and the voice of common sense told him to bolt before he puked all over a potential crime scene, but his feet moved of their oven volition to the bed where Rebecca had spent the past two weeks. He thought he saw her outline in the rumpled linens, and he wanted to touch her.

_Not her bed, _his mind reminded him mulishly. _Her bed is with you, and it smells like orange blossoms and shampoo and woman. It's got not enough pillows and too many goddamn blankets, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be when it's fourteen below and snow drifts against the windows like tapping fingers. She lies on your chest and belly and tucks her hands and feet against your body for warmth, and you can pass the night away listenin' to her heartbeat and smoothin' your palm over the bony curve of her spine. The best Christmas Day you ever had was spent in that bed, drowsin' and talkin' and playin' slap-and-tickle all day while the snow built mountains on your front stoop and your mother left waspish messages on your answerin' machine, demandin' to know why you hadn't turned up to watch your father open his socks. You made minestrone soup and sipped it from ceramic mugs that made your hands prickle and turn pink with the heat._

He picked up the pillow and pressed it to his nose. Old starch and industrial detergent and the sour smell of unwashed scalp. But she was not there. He turned the pillow in his hands, squeezed the lumps of cotton between his restless fingers. The fabric was rough, not worn smooth by her cheek and sagging beneath the comfortable weight of habit. He tossed it onto the bed and picked up the sheet.

It was sticky and gritty, and he grimaced in a reflexive moue of distaste. It was like touching shed skin. He pressed his nose to the folds, and a moment later, he was bolting from the room, gorge lodged in his throat and eyes blurred with tears. He stumbled into a row of chairs in the hallway, struck the wall, and slumped there, hands clamped around the arm of a chair to steady himself.

"Flack?" Stella, concerned and faraway.

He swallowed . "Aw, shit, Stel," he said. "The old biddy was right. They left my girl in her own piss. It's all over the fuckin' sheets."

A hand on his shoulder. "Hey, Don? Listen to me. It's gonna be okay. We're gonna find her. The team's on the way, and we're gonna dust, bag, and tag every inch of this place until she turns up. I've got a court order for her phone to find out who she was calling, and I can guarantee you that Mac will shake people until teeth rattle to get to the truth."

He shook off her hand. "This is my fuckin' fault. I never shoulda put her here."

"You-,"

"She begged me, and I made her come anyway. She begged me, Stel."

"You were doing what you that was best," Stella countered. "You had to keep food on the table."

"I coulda told the brass to fuck off, refused the nod for the task force. I coulda taken paid leave. I shoulda. Now she's gone God knows where, pumped full of drugs. Christ, in her condition, anybody could grab her. Fuckin' _hurt_ her."

Images crowded his head of Rebecca at the mercy of a dopesick gang, lying in the trash with her maternity dress over her head and her underwear around one ankle. Maybe they were finished with her by now, and she was lying in the trash with a crushed skull, feeling her brain pulse with every breath and wondering when the stink would attract attention. Or maybe they weren't, and they were fucking her by turns and with beer bottles while she was too weak and stoned to cry out.

"Don," Stella was saying sharply, and then she was turning him to face her. "Don, go home. There's nothing you can do here, and you're driving yourself crazy."

"And do what?" he snapped. "Huh? Stare at my weddin' picture on the wall or the fuckin' crib where my baby's s'posed to sleep?"

In truth, the crib was only half-finished. He'd bought it a few weeks after his Junior was declared viable, a sturdy, wooden model with a drop-down, fold-out side so Rebecca could reach the baby without standing. He'd brought it home and proudly shown it to Rebecca, and he'd promised her that it would be finished before the baby came.

But Bob Villa he wasn't, and as the months passed and her belly rounded, progress was incremental. He would sit cross-legged on the floor with the elaborate plans spread in front of him, intent on getting to business, and then his cell phone would hum with news of a body in an industrial dryer, and the project would be delayed again. When he did apply himself to the task, the complex diagrams and geometric shapes confounded him. Rebecca had offered to have a mathematician friend set it up, but he insisted on doing it himself. What kind of father would he be if he couldn't assemble his son's crib? So it took shape a screw at a time.

_You remember the last time you worked on it? Just before you brought her in? For once, the task force was dead as shit, and so you went out for beers and a game of pool with Messer, and when you got home, you decided to work on the crib. So you got out the plans and the tools, and you turned on ESPN. Rebecca was on the couch with a bowl of blackberries, but when she saw you setting up shop, she got into her chair and rolled up behind you to watch._

_You'd had a few beers, and the world was soft around the edges. Your hands floated too much, and the screws resisted proper placement. You squinted peevishly at the holes and swore at them not to behave like the fuckin' Knicks, but it didn't help. The pieces were stubbornly unjoined. You swore and cursed and derided the manufacturers as anal-retentive German engineer cocksuckers with no sense of fucking decency or common sense, and you threw the plans at the TV. Or tried. They hovered dreamily in the air and settled over your legs like a contented and proprietary cat. You stared at them for a minute, and then you cussed so loud and long that Mrs. Petrinski threatened you with Michael by-God Bloomberg._

_And Rebecca? She laughed her ass off, laughed until she cried. She threw her head back and howled, clutching her jiggling belly, and she reminded you of Snoopy, laughing until he cried on top of his doghouse. You were amused and pissed at the same time, and you were about to demand what was so goddamned funny when she grabbed your hand and placed it on her belly._

Look, _she said between watery giggles, _he's laughing, too.

_And sure enough, her belly rippled, and little feet kicked enthusiastically against the heel of your palm. He spun and kicked again, and you put your cheek on her belly and laughed until it hurt, because you, a dumbass cop son of a cop, were getting a Norman Rockwell moment. You were gonna have a family soon. It was a Waterford crystal moment in a lifetime of shattered glass, and it was sublime._

_She snorted and wheezed and coughed laughter like phlegm, and she ran her fingers through your hair. She told you your accent was at its thickest and most beautiful when you forgot yourself, sharp as sour cream on her tongue. You had no idea what she meant by that, but it made her happy, so you spent the rest of the night callin' her Snoopy and thickenin' your accent as much as you could. The next day, the task force kicked into high gear, and a few weeks later, she was packin' her suitcase to go to the hospital, but that moment was perfect in its sweetness._

"Fuck!" he shouted, and kicked the nearest chair. It skidded across the linoleum floor, struck the opposite wall with a heavy thud, and rebounded to the center, where it settled with a graceless, elephantine flop.

"Flack-,"

"For God's sake, Stella, don't tell me everything is fine, 'cause it ain't." He threaded his fingers behind his head and began to pace. Stella wisely said nothing.

An orderly was watching him from the shadows of a stairwell, and as he caught his gaze, the man beckoned with a spidery finger.

He nudged Stella. "Stel." He nodded in the direction of the orderly.

The orderly looked dismayed at Stella's presence, but he stood his ground as they approached, one skinny, leathery hand curled around the handle of a push broom. He nodded noncommittally and stretched in a long, reaching stroke. "Sir," he said. "Ma'am."

"You got something you want to tell us?" Stella prompted.

A slow stroke of the broom. "Mmm. I might. I just might."

"Listen, pal," Flack snarled. Why don't you do us all a favor and cut the bul-,"

"She was under her own power when she left," the man said, unfazed.

"How do you know?"

"'Cause I'm the one that let her out," came the mild reply. The broom reached out, probing the white linoleum like an anteater's tongue.

Flack seized the orderly by the collar of his shirt and slammed him against the wall. His heartbeat was vibrating in his throat, and adrenaline was bitter on his tongue. He was dimly aware of Stella's hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off with an irritated grimace.

"You let my pregnant, doped-up wife leave the hospital? Do you have any fuckin' clue the danger you put her in? Let me tell you somethin', you fuckin' scumbag. If anythin' happens to her or my baby, you ain't gonna make it to-,"

"Flack, enough!" Stella was tugging at his shoulder with both hands.

The orderly studied him. There was no fear in his expression, no inveterate wariness of the police officer's wrath. It was sly and strangely compassionate, as though he were watching an animal snapping ineffectually at a lethal snare.

"Do you know where your girl was before New York?" he said quietly.

The question struck him like a slap, unexpected and stinging, and he tightened his grip on the man's collar, visions of sociopathic stalkers dancing in his head. He racked his brain for images of skels he had put away, and who had cried vengeance as they were dragged through the indifferent jaws of the cellblock. But there had been too many over the years, and time had worn them all to a depressing sameness.

"What the fuck do you know about my wife?" He shook the orderly, and was perversely satisfied at the thump of his back against the stone.

"I knew her when she was a slip of a girl, eleven years old and more eyes than skin. Even back then, she was stubborn as a government mule and twice as tough in here as any lifer convict I ever saw." He tapped his temple. "She was gonna buck the system as hard as she could. Damned if she didn't." The orderly thought for a moment. "She never told you about that place, did she?" he asked shrewdly.

"Yeah, yeah she did." It was soft, dazed, and Flack let go of the orderly's collar. "She said the school was all right, but the infirmary… She didn't like to talk about that."

"She didn't tell you the half of it," the orderly declared, and straightened his shirt. "If she did, you never woulda brought her here. No sane man condemns what he loves to hell if he knows what he's doin'. I worked there for twenty-three years, and I promise you, it was hell." The orderly picked up his broom.

"Somethin' happens to doctors when they realize that weakness is permanent. Sometimes, they try to protect it, but most of them decide to exploit it. They're never goin' to get better, so who cares if they get a little worse? Maybe their sufferin'll help somebody who matters."

"That's a pretty bleak assessment," Stella observed skeptically.

The orderly stayed his broom and rested his chin on the rounded nub of the mop handle. "Have you ever been at the mercy of a doctor for more than a couple hours?" Stella didn't answer, but he continued as though she had. "No, I didn't think so. To you, doctors area convenience, but your wife knew better, Detective. She knew what was behind the mask, and she was afraid. You would be, too, if you had any damn sense, but you can't see. You haven't learned yet. She came by those lessons hard, and she ain't goin' to forget."

Flack stared it him in helpless incredulity. His cop-voice was insisting that the orderly was either a scam artist or a crazy son of a bitch, but the words resonated behind his sternum like the vibrato thrum of a bass chord, and his mind conjured images of Rebecca dissolving into absolute hysteria the instant the blue band closed around her bony wrist.

_Baby, please don't make me stay here._

"The longer you're with 'em, the less human you become," the orderly was saying now. "They're so busy dissecting your parts that they go blind to the sum, and when that happens, no amount of begging will save you. She was luckier than a lot of students there. She didn't go to the infirmary often, but when she did, by God, she fought tooth and claw and screamed to beat the band. I was in there when she came in one time, and it took ten of the bastards to hold her down. I ain't never heard screaming like that since. Until yesterday afternoon, an' I knew what I had to do."

When Flack continued to gape at him in numb stupefaction, he sighed and said, "An animal in a trap will chew its paw off to escape, even if it means bleeding to death a few yards away. She was in a trap, Detective, and she was chewing, and I was afraid that if I didn't give her a chance to run, she'd end up like Judith Pruitt."

"Judith Pruitt," he heard himself say.

"She was another girl at that damned school. Soft as tallow inside and out. It ate her up, and one day, she climbed into bed and slit her throat with a piece of broken handmirror."

"Rebecca wouldn't do that."

"Maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn't." The orderly shrugged. "All I know is, I gave her another way out, and she took it. Look for the magic. They're drawn to it even if they don't know it. That's where you'll find her."

It was Stella who broke the stunned, soporific silence after that. "Come on, Flack," she said gently.

"She went that way," the orderly said, and pointed to the fire door behind him.


	2. Alice

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:Nyverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

All references to magic and magical ability come courtesy of J.K Rowling and Harry Potter. The latter is the property of the former, as well as Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: **This is a work of complete and utter crack and contains an OFC. If that offends thee, please exit to the rear and stay in your lane. There is no need to pee in my pool. Also contains spoilers for CSI:NY S2. Read at your own risk.**

**This section contains graphic references to the Holocaust that may be disturbing to many readers. Exercise judgment when reading.**

The city was a forest of stone. It rose above her head in tall, grey spires, branchless trunks heaved from the bowels of the earth in a labor long forgotten. She found herself looking up at them in sloe-eyed contemplation. The world pitched and yawed, and if she tried to focus on something too intently, she could almost see the cool, glass wall that danced inches from her cheek. Her eyelids were heavy, and it was easier to see the hulking shapes of the building and the sharp, Euclidean angles of the people as they passed.

Her husband knew the city intimately, had traced its sharp corners and worn curves with the soles of his feet. He could map the contours of Midtown and Central Park with his eyes closed, and even when he wandered aimlessly, he knew exactly where he was going. He didn't just live in the city; he lived with it, was inextricably a part of it, and sometimes when she walked beside him on a stroll around the block, she could swear he was talking to it with the rhythm of his footfalls.

But he was not here, her living compass, and the poison in her system had blunted and blurred her sense of direction. The city had never spoken to her as it did to him, and it did not lead her through its complex warrens. It shifted around and beneath her in insouciant indifference, and the concrete was hard beneath her wheels. Everywhere she turned, there were stone walls and blank, grime-blinded eyes.

_I'm Gretel, _she thought dreamily, _but where is my Hansel? He left me without any breadcrumbs._

It was hard to move. The sedative was wearing off, but it still filled her limbs with lead, and the added weight of her distended belly made locomotion difficult. Her fingers groped for her wheels, slipped, and found them again in a clumsy, drunken grip. She moved sluggishly forward, lips thin with concentration and effort. It was early afternoon in late July, and heat radiated from the pavement in a shimmering haze.

She had forgotten about the heat. The heat was crueler here, less damp, but more confined. It slunk between the buildings that trapped it at ground level, and curled around feet and ankles and napes, sticky and insistent and prickling as sand in the crevices of her body. Her belly itched with a damp sheen of sweat, and the baby turned peevishly inside her. Her hand reached to stroke him, torpid and listless, and she licked her lips with a sandpaper tongue.

_You need water, girl, _her grandfather insisted. His normally craggy voice was distorted and glottal, as though he were speaking through a mouthful of mud. _That white-smocked bitch didn't give you enough because she didn't want the inconvenience of taking you for a piss, and what little you had is seeping through your pores by the minute. If you pass out on the pavement, you'll wind up right back where you started, and Nurse Ratchett will make sure you don't open your eyes until they're washing off your baby in the delivery room. You need to get out of the sun and get something to eat. Neither of you are going to last much longer out here._

_I need a lot of things, Grandpa, _she countered wearily. _I need water and food and a place to pee. I need something to wear other than this flimsy hospital gown. The studied indifference of your average New Yorker will only last so long before a street vendor or a beat cop notices the polka-dot shift and the distended belly and the way I'm wobbling and lurching down the sidewalk in fits and starts like a druggie or a schizophrenic in the throes of a break. I'll end up in the drunk tank or in the locked ward at Bellevue, and because my ID is still in the property room at Trinity, no one will believe that I'm the wife of a homicide detective. They'll think it's the fevered fantasy of a diseased mind, and by the time someone bothers to check, some bright bulb in administration will have called CPS. They'll take my baby from me before I even know what he looks like._

But most of all, she needed Don. She needed his quiet strength and his gentle protectiveness. She needed his breath on the shell of her ear and his voice inside it, murmuring that it would be okay, beautiful; everything would be all right. She wanted the smell of his soap in her nostrils and the fine tickle of the hairs of his nape against the pads of her fingers. She craved his solidity and the softness of his lips.

Thinking of him made her cheeks and chest ache, and she blinked back tears she could ill-afford to shed. She had been looking for him since she slipped out the hospital fire door into the pre-dawn gloom, turning her heart in search of him, but the drugs had made her stupid and nauseated, and the map of the city in her head was distorted and smeared. She had started for his precinct, only to discover a few minutes later that she was heading in the opposite direction, and by the time she'd turned around, she'd been exhausted and trembling and queasy. She'd retched noisily over the side of the chair and stared at the puddle of bile, yellow and gelid on the blacktop, and then she'd cried, lank, greasy hair hanging in her spokes and snot dangling from the end of her nose, the clear tendril reaching for the slick pool of vomit with an eager, delicate finger.

She'd gotten halfway to the 14th when she'd realized that he wasn't there. The task force was headquartered at the 33rd, which was fifteen blocks to the east. Even in the best of shape, it would have taken her two hours to navigate the rutted sidewalks and suicidal crosswalks choked with morning commuters. Her arms ached, and her belly cramped with the fitful pressure of a baby unaccustomed to so much activity after two weeks of almost absolute stillness. He'd stomped viciously on her bladder to express his discomfiture, and she could only cry and beat her palms impotently against the rubber-coated rims of her chair. A passing bag lady had offered her a black-toothed smile in recognition of their shared madness and continued down the street, clutching her bulging shopping bag to her chest like a cherished infant. She could only stare after her in wistful longing of her mobility and curse her own weakness.

_You could have gone to the 14th anyway, _a ruthlessly practical voice insisted. _He probably wouldn't have been there, but his friends would have, and they would have found him. Mac and Stella would have gone to get him personally, and while they were on the warpath, blazing a scorched path through the thin, blue line, Hawkes would have put on his doctor credentials like armor and swung into action. He'd have brought you water and checked your vitals, and he probably would have helped you pee. If he didn't, Lindsay would, if for no other reason than to prove to Messer that she could still wrangle a heifer. You'd have been safe and nominally comfortable until he came for you._

_But your pride is as virulent as plague, and you couldn't stand the thought of his friends and fellow officers seeing you like that, with your hair in greasy hanks and piss clinging to the skin of your thighs like musk. You knew they could smell you from fifteen paces, rank and fetid and radiating filth. You didn't want them to look at you and wonder what madness had possessed him to bind himself to you and invest his future between your legs and in your womb. You didn't want to be the laughingstock of rookies over steaming cups of coffee and between sugary bites of cruller and glazed doughnuts, and you didn't want to subject him to their sidelong glances and sly inquiries about his old lady._

_And let's face it, you didn't want to take the chance that he _would _be there. As much as you need to see him, you don't want him to see you this way, discomposed, with diaper rash on your legs and stink clinging to you like desperation. All your life, you've struggled to hide your weakness behind layers of fierce independence, intellectual competence, and devil-may-care hubris. _

_Granted, he's seen more of your vulnerabilities than most. He's mapped the latticework of scars on your legs with his fingers and the tip of his tongue, and he knows that you can only stand for ninety seconds before the muscles shudder and burn with fatigue. He's seen you curled into a fetal position on the floor, writhing in the grips of spastic cramps, fingers clawed in the carpet to anchor you to yourself. He's cleaned up the aftermath and brought the Advil and the warm tea. But that was all right because it was your decision to let him see those things. There was no choice in this, no chance to preserve as much of your dignity as you could. You are lain bare, and there is nowhere to hide._

_But most of all, you don't want to look into his eyes and see disappointment, that flicker of shame that follows you like a fetch and roosts in the eyes of everyone you adored. Your mother, who reminded you daily that you were not the perfect doll for which she had wished upon a star. Your father, who loved you as well as he could through his bourbon haze, but who had wanted a boy. He got neither a boy nor a healthy child, and sometimes you wonder if that two-pronged disappointment wasn't what drove him to the bottle. Your doctors, who hmmed and hawed and cut the roadmap for their success into your skin and then scowled in disapproval when your progress didn't meet with their lofty expectations. And the black-eyed devil whom you followed for three years, and who cast you out one summer evening on the blasted moors of Scotland._

_Don was the first person to ever look at you without condemnation. There was curiosity at first, and perhaps a touch of pity, but you satisfied the first and cured him of the second, and truth be told, you suspect you managed to exceed his expectations when you came to him a few days after Thanksgiving and told him you were pregnant. For all his talk of taking children as and if they came, you knew he wanted them, wanted a son or a daughter to raise as proof that in that, at least, he was a better man than his father. His children would love rather than resent him, and he would be the father he had always wanted._

_But if he sees you like this, the disappointment will steal into his eyes like it has into so many others, and that's more than you can stand. So you're going to sit here on the sidewalk and broil in the sun while your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth for want of water. Pride goeth before a fall, and yours promises to be spectacular._

A briefcase struck her shoulder, and it occurred to her that she had been sitting in the middle of the sidewalk for far too long. She curled her fingers around the rims of her wheels and began to push. The sudden motion brought her stomach into the back of her throat, and the world spun in a languid circle. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, and when she opened them again, the world had settled into tenuous focus. She pumped her arms again, and the chair jounced over another few feet of pavement.

_What do you want him for, anyway? _asked a sullen voice at the base of her skull. _He's the one who put you there in the first place. You tried to tell him, but he didn't want to hear it. He's just like all those other self-righteous bastards who've claimed to have your best interest at heart. You're better off without him. Cut your losses and run. If you close your eyes and concentrate, you could be in Diagon Alley in two heartbeats. Your vault at Gringotts' should still be there, untouched after eleven years, and with all the interest you've accrued, you wouldn't have to worry for much. It's not Malfoy money, but it would be more than enough for you to rent a flat and hire a midwife and a Mediwitch. You could give birth comfortably with the miracle of Wizarding medicine, and there would no more intrusive needles._

Malfoy. She snorted as she worked her left front wheel out of a pothole with jerky strokes of her arms. She wondered what had become of the Malfoy fortune now that Lucius was dead and his son had met an ignominious end on the floor of a police precinct. The Ministry had likely seized all assets and was congratulating itself on a job well done, never mind that the job had been done by a pregnant woman ten thousand miles away.

The murder of Malfoy in front Don had unraveled the identity she had created for herself. All of her degrees had been reduced to lambskin irrelevance, and Don had been left floundering, staring at her as if he had never seen her before, never breathed her name into her mouth in the darkness of their bedroom. She had exposed herself as witch, and for a moment, she had been sure she had lost him.

But he was made of sterner stuff than even she had given him credit for, and he had rebounded with surprising grace. He had believed her when she told him about Death Eaters and dragons and children forced to kill. There had been endless questions, yes, but none of them had begun or ended with, _Are you fuckin' crazy?_

Which was why his disbelief about the hospital and what awaited here there hurt so much. The same mouth that had professed belief in creatures he had never seen beyond the pages of a child's fairy tale had adamantly denied the truths behind her cowering terror. He had told her there were no such things as needles brandished as weapons and restraints to ensure compliance. The body's natural processes were not used as inducements or punishments, and worth was not assigned on the basis of long-term viability.

_Of course he couldn't believe it, girl, _her grandfather said gruffly. _No one can unless they've walked that mile themselves. Humans are remarkably stubborn when confronted with truths they don't want to see. People knew as far back as 1938 what the goddamn Jerrys were doing in those factories and work camps, but they didn't want to know, so they didn't. They just kept right on living their lives in the shadow of those smokestacks-eating and working and fucking-and if they ever caught a whiff of that high, sweet smell or wondered why the soap they were washing their ass with was so damn yellow, they ducked their heads and decided not to dwell on it._

_I liberated Auschwitz in 1945, walked into that pit of hell with my shiny boots and my gun and my cigarettes and my friends, and I couldn't believe it. None of us could because things like that aren't supposed to _be. _Even nightmares have limits, a precipice the mind won't cross, but Auschwitz was real, and everywhere you looked, the precipice had been sheared away. After a while, you tried not looking at it, but everywhere you turned, there was fresh horror, and even if you closed your eyes, you could still smell and hear and taste._

_The smell was the worst. Rancid shit and rotting bodies who knew they were dead, and rotting bodies that didn't. Garbage and rat shit and running sores. It was a stench that got into your nose and stayed there. We all burned our uniforms when we came out and scrubbed with lye soap, but we all swore we could still smell it._ _When it was still there after a week, one of the privates suggested maybe it was the soap we were using. It wasn't, but once we got the thought into our heads, it wouldn't leave. We didn't wash for a week, and it would have been longer if the CO hadn't chewed our asses raw. _

_That smell stayed with us for the rest of our lives. You'd be sitting in a bar or in the backseat of a car with a woman, and it would creep up through the floor and sprinkle itself over your food, and you'd been trying to hold in your guts and put your pecker back into your pants and making excuses about why you had to leave._

_A few days after we liberated the camp, command decided to bring the good civilians of the surrounding countryside for a guided tour. We rounded them up and marched them in, and we made them look at what their Fuhrer had done. Most of them wrinkled their nose at the smell when they first passed through the gates, like it was nothing but a little dog shit on a spring afternoon. They'd gotten used to the smell of burning fat and hair. Then they saw what was making the smell. Some of the women fainted, and many of the men went green around the gills. More than a few puked on their shows._

_But you know what the damnedest thing was, girl? For every five that turned green and swooned, there was one who didn't, who refused to acknowledge what they were seeing even after you grabbed their chin and forced them to look. Their eyes would glaze, and their chin would set, and they'd frogmarch through the camp, gaze fixed on anything but there._

_Drove us crazy and pissed us off, those bastards did, and a few of the boys kicked the shit out of the most uppity ones, but as much as we hated them for their indifference and stubborn denial, we envied it, too. We'd have traded our screaming nightmares and the taste of rotten pork in our rations for their stone-faced insulation in a heartbeat. We wished we could unsee what we saw or forget it, but there wasn't booze enough in the canteen to drown the memory of thirteen-year-old boy hanging in the razor wire, bits of him falling off and being gobbled up by the emaciated prison dogs while he bloated and blackened in the sun._

_Grandpa, I don't know where this is going, but I think you should stop. _She swallowed a retch.

_My point is, girl, that your husband didn't believe you because he didn't want to. He could accept that junkies blow syphilis-infected cocks for a gram of cut-rate smack because he's seen it, just like he can believe a mother would broil her newborn in the oven because the voices told her to. He's seen that, too. But he can't believe that a hospital would hold such horrors because if he did, he'd have to ask himself what kind of man that made him to put you there._

She closed her eyes to shut her grandfather out. The world was starting to slalom again, and the beginnings of a headache were threading stealthily behind her eyes. She was hot and tired and crampy, and she wanted to curl up in a cool, dark place and drift until the nightmare was over. She thought of home, and of the soft invitation of their bed. It smelled like Don, Irish Spring and Right Guard and bony-kneed male, and she wanted to nestle in his pillows and blankets, and dream.

The sullen voice was right. She could be gone in the blink of an eye if she could wrest a moment's concentration from the stuporous haze of drugs and heat. But her mind was scattered and diffuse as mist, and even if it hadn't been, she would have hesitated. Scotland wasn't home, and never had been. This was home, this dirty, sordid, glorious city where she had found a love to rival her long-simmering hatred of the world and everything in it.

Besides, she couldn't remember if Apparition was safe for a pregnant woman. Lessons had been long ago and far away in a Great Hall crowded with sixth- and seventh-years. The first tugging eddies in what would become the roiling maelstrom of war were massing outside the cool, stone walls, and the creatures living in the heart of the Forbidden Forest had stirred uneasily in their bowers and burrows. Hagrid's paddock and vegetable garden had still smelled of turned earth and green, growing things, but elsewhere, the ground stank of old and sour magic, ozone on the cusp of a thunderstorm. Down the path that led to the school, Hogsmeade had gone about its business, unaware that in six months' time, it would cease to exist.

She had been grouped with Seamus Finnegan and Neville Longbottom, sandwiched between Neville's rounded, indecisive shoulders and Seamus' broad ones, and Professor Flitwick and Professor McGonagall had flitted and strode throughout the milling, jostling students, calling out instructions and observing technique. Neville had been so out of sorts that he'd splinched himself before proper instruction began and left his legs jitterbugging on the Gryffindor table while his upper half sat miserably in the middle of the floor like a macabre centerpiece.

Seamus had splinched, too, left his leg and a pinkie behind, and while she had managed the procedure with all body parts accounted for, her chair had been missing a push handle and two wheels, and she'd sprawled to the floor with a bone-rattling thump and bitten her tongue hard enough to fill her mouth with blood. It had taken another year and private lessons with an empathetic but perfectionist Professor Flitwick before she mastered the art of moving herself across the countryside without leaving her rolling warden behind.

_It's been eleven years almost to the day since you've closed your eyes and clicked your heels and thought there was no place like home, _cautioned the gruff voice of Mad-Eye Moody. _Eleven years since you imagined yourself away. A skill like that takes practice and diligence, and you're sorely short on both. Maybe it's still there, buried beneath layers of dust and disuse, and maybe you could brush it off and turn it to your will again, but it's more likely that you'll splinch, and this time, it won't be your chair you leave behind._

_Can you live with that risk? If you're off by so much as a fraction, you'll leave that baby somewhere between here, there, and nowhere at all. Maybe it'll be all of him, and he'll hit the pavement and splatter his brains all over Broadway, or maybe his head will stay in your womb and his feet will end up in Red Hook, kicking dreamily in mid-air. Ten days from now, you'll deliver a shrieking head, and how will you explain to your husband where the other two-thirds of his son went when he was all there on the last ultrasound?_

The baby shifted inside her, and a tiny fist pressed against the distended wall of her abdomen. _Don't even think about it, Ma._ Despite her grogginess and flailing confusion and the nausea that threatened with every roll of her wheels, she laughed because it was so much like Don, bullish and unafraid and-

_Gryffindor. So very Gryffindor. You knew that's what Don Flack was the moment you saw him running down that perp on 34th Street. He was Gryffindor to the marrow, unafraid and unapologetic for his fearlessness. It's why you fell in love with him. Because he reminded you of everything that was good about the House of Lions. He was strong and brave and loyal, and he evoked memories of Seamus Finnegan, a seventeen-year-old boy who once sheltered you with his body while the sky fell and sorrow coated your face and hair in a fine mist of ash._

Seamus. She wanted Seamus, with his clean, cut-grass smell and his Irish brogue and his guileless pragmatism. She longed for the simplicity of magic, but Seamus was long gone, returned to Cork and his love of the West Ham football club, and she had promised Don that magic would not touch their son until he was safely in his mother's arms. So there was nothing for it but to wander, hidden in the seething mass of humanity.

She straggled over the sidewalks, past delis and salons and porno shops. She saw them all through the warped fishbowl of the drugs that lingered in her system. Her bladder ached and throbbed, but there was nowhere to go, and she was too weak and logy to stand. The headache had sharpened to a hot pike behind her ears, and the baby was in nearly constant motion, turning and flexing.

"It's okay, sweetie," she murmured, and stroked her aching belly.

_The hell it is, _her grandfather grunted. _You're on the verge of sunstroke. Get out of the sun, you foolish child, and call your husband while you still can. It doesn't matter what he's done. Plenty of people have done the wrong thing for the right reason. So've you if you want to muck with hash. He's that baby's father, and you need him._

She did need him. It was a need bordering on desperation, and yet, she still hesitated. Not from pride, but from fear.

You're afraid that if you call him, he won't come. He'll send an ambulance or a squad car, and they'll whisk you back to the pitiless embrace of the restraints. You've always wondered which of you he loved more-the job or you-and you're afraid you'll find out. Until last week, there was no doubt in your mind, but bedrock has turned to silt beneath your wheels, and if it's the answer you suspect, your heart will never be mended.

_Then ask, _said the prim voice of Professor McGonagall. _If not him, then someone who would know._

_Who?_ she thought dismally, and then she knew.

She looked up and found herself in front of Grand Central Station, and magic tickled her veins like the promise of electrical current. Inside, it would be cool and dark, and there would be a water fountain to slake her thirst. A cramp sank into her belly, serrated glass and sand, and that decided her. She ducked beneath the extended arm of an emerging businessman and slipped into the heart of the city, praying that when she found a phone, the person on the other end would accept the charges.


	3. The White Rabbit

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

The last time Gavin Moran had spoken to anyone named Flack, it had been a year after his forced retirement. The kid had invited him for a beer. Not at Sullivan's, of course; he might have had the subtlety of a jackhammer with perps and skels, but he was remarkably tactful when it came to friends on the down and out. He'd turned him down, been harsher than he should have been now that he thought about it, and there had been no more phone calls.

The kid was better off, really. He had a bright future ahead of him in the department, and the last thing he needed was to get the stink of bad cop on himself. Bringing down a department wunderkind was the shit the soulless jackals at IAB lived for, and having Donnie Flack, Jr.'s head on their infamous wall would be a coup, a twofer, because it would smear his legendary old man in the process, and the bigwigs would be able to puff out their chests and say that they played no favorites. It was all bullshit, but the PD brass had the uncanny ability to make shit smell like Chanel.

It was almost fucking magic.

_Sons have a way of doin' that, don't they? Bringin' dishonor upon their fathers. Hector brought the whole goddamned roof down and took everything with it. Twenty-five years on the job went down with the stroke of a pen and the fingerprint on a Coke can, and twenty-three years of marriage went on the spit from the rim. Andrea was packed and gone two days after the kid walked you home with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his pants, and you wound up sleepin' on the couch 'cause after twenty-three years of bein' a pair, the bed was too damn big._

The bitch of it was that your heroic charge in the name of the son who hated your guts was all for nothin'. Hector went upstate anyway, and now he's getting slammed in the ass by rapists and thugs, and odds are, he ain't thinkin' of dear old dad while he's bitin' the pillow. Meanwhile, your wife is livin' with her ma in Schenectady, the daughters who were proud of you refuse to speak to you, and you spend most of your time flippin' through the channels on your shitpot TV and watchin' the walls of your apartment turn yellow from your stink.

It hurt to think of Hector, so he forced himself to think of Flack, but that hurt just as much because Flack was the son he should've had. He was good people, and his folks had raised him properly. The kid had worshipped him, and long after he'd gotten his golden shield, he'd still called to ask advice on a tough case or just shoot the shit over beers. Before Gavin's life had unraveled, he'd come by the apartment for dinner, and he always brought Andrea a bottle of wine or some fresh fruit. He'd always told his girls that Donnie was the kind of guy they should marry. Hell, he'd even entertained the notion that one of them might marry _him_, and never mind the ten-year age difference.

You knew he was somethin' special the minute he walked into the precinct. Oh, he looked just like all the other rookies-equipment belt oiled and arranged to the nines, shoes polished, cap brim crisp and starched, and badge positioned prominently on his chest, and he danced from foot to foot like he had to piss-but there was a lot goin' on upstairs. He was sharp and inquisitive, and you knew that if you could bridle his enthusiasm and keep him from getting killed in the first year, you could really make somethin' of him.

_You almost danced a jig when you got paired up with him and not that Barnes asshole, who was a step above functionally retarded, and who washed out six months later when he ran into a parked car during a foot pursuit and broke both his kneecaps. He went on sick leave and never came back, and last you heard, he's runnin' a body shop in Queens. You and Flack laughed your balls off at his sorry ass, and it was a runnin' joke between you for years. You'd be bitchin' about an unruly perp or the hooker who bit you durin' a collar, and he'd raise his glass'a beer, tip it in salute, and say, _'Least you didn't Barnes it.

_Kid was like an Irish Setter on the street, all gangly enthusiasm and New York hardass, and more than once, you thought his balls were gonna get his brains splattered all over the street before he could put 'em to use. But he was always listenin', even when he was runnin' flat-out after a thief, and he never made the same mistake twice. If you told him he'd fucked up, he sulked, but he also wanted to know why and how, and he was capable of learnin' on his own. You didn't have to spoon-feed him or wipe his ass for him. He was the easiest mentorin' job you've ever had, and if you could'a, you'd've partnered with him until you retired._

_He was born to be a cop, but unlike most badge babies, who thought the uniform was their birthright and swaggered around the station house with their thumbs hooked through their belt loops, he didn't take it for granted. He was always afraid he wasn't doin' enough. He never said anythin', never begged for approval like some of the other rookies, but sometimes, after a rough collar, he'd sidle up in the locker room and mutter, _So, that was some chase that guy gave us huh? But it don't matter 'cause we got 'em. _You knew what he was really sayin', what he was really askin', 'cause your girls said it to you all the time. _Lookit my drawin', Daddy. _And it always came with the unspoken corollary, _Did I do it good? _It broke your heart that he even had to ask, but you never let on. You just clapped him on the back and knocked his uniform cap off his head and invited him for a beer._

_You had him for three years, and then word came down that he was getting his shield. He was twenty-five goin' on twenty-six, still a snot-nosed punk by cop standards, and more than a few old-timers were pissed that he was getting what they'd been bustin' their asses for for ten years. You were proud of him-of course you were; he was your kid and what kind'a asshole wouldn't be proud of their kid?-but you understood how they felt. You'd dreamed of that shield, too, once upon a time, and you an' Andrea even had a spot picked out for it on the dresser, but it never came your way, and after fifteen years of waitin', you finally figured out it wasn't comin'. Now the kid was getting the nod three years in and still in trainin' pants, and it didn't seem fair._

_Part of you resented him for leavin' you behind in the dead-end bullpen of the station house after you'd busted your balls to make him the best cop he could be, but mostly, you were sad to see him go. You had counted on havin' him there for a few more years, maybe for the rest of your career, and it was over._

_Much as it hurt, you were determined to be the one to send him off. Not Bernadetti or that brown-nosin' dick, Philips, who'd been ridin' his jock 'cause he was Don Sr.'s son. So you took him out to a Japanese steakhouse and ate sushi piled high with wasabi until your tongues were throbbin' and raw. You drank beer and sake, and the kid admired the legs on the hostess._

You know I always got your back, Gav, _he said, and you smiled and shook him by the scruff of the neck and told yourself that it was just the booze talkin, that within a month, the calls and promises to stop by and keep in touch would stop._

_But three months later, he was still callin', still turnin' up at the apartment to talk, pokin' his head into the kitchen and stealin' food from the cuttin' board 'til Andrea swatted him out with a dishtowel. He still said hello to your girls, and he still wanted to talk shop and discuss cases. And he was still askin' if he'd done it good._

_You were surprised when he asked you to meet someone, a girl he was seein'. Donnie had always been circumspect about who he was seein, never liked to talk outta school about what a date had entailed, though you could usually tell how well a date had gone by the number of rings underneath his eyes in the mornin'. He mentioned a few names, but never anything serious. So when he called you up one Sunday and asked if you'd meet someone, it piqued your curiosity._

_Two weeks later, you met him at Sullivan's, expectin' to see him with some leggy red-head or a busty brunette, but he was sittin' at a table with a tiny, blonde girl in a wheelchair. You weren't so sure it was a date, then; maybe it was a vic who was havin' trouble comin' forward or a family member from outta town. But the longer you watched him, the more you realized it _was _a date. It was in the way he was lookin' at her, intent and heavy-lidded and shy, like he was afraid to open his mouth in case she saw his heart. He was holdin' her hand, too, and whisperin' in her ear._

_He didn't see you, so you stood in the shadows by the bar and watched. His elbows were propped on the table, and he was gesticulating wildly with his free hand, stabbing at the air with a toothpick. His other hand was linked with hers, and they twined on the tabletop like lazy snakes. She said somethin' to him, and he ducked his head and shrugged as if to say, _Yeah, I know. Sorry 'bout that. _He was grinnin' like a fool._

_She laughed, and then he leaned in and kissed her, cupped her face in his hand. The minute you saw that kiss, you knew why he wanted you to see her. Donnie had never been a violent kid, had never used his fists on a perp if he didn't have to, but there had always been an indelicacy to him, a natural heavy-handedness that showed whenever he slopped coffee over the edge of his cup because he was holdin' it too tight. But those broad hands that had once slammed a tweaker's head onto the pavement outside the precinct were cradlin' her face like it was porcelain, drawin' thumbs over the high, sharp ridges of her cheekbones. His eyes were closed, and his lips were soft and light against hers. One breath, two breaths, three, four… They just kept breathin' into each other, lips always on the verge of a smile._

_They finally sat back, and she drew her thumb over his bottom lip. The kid caught sight of you a second or two later, and with his cheery, _Hey, Gav, over here! _You put to rest the feeble hope that he might make one of your daughters a decent husband._

_He bought you a beer and introduced you to his girl, and then he sat back and watched. What exactly he was watchin' for, you still couldn't say, but his eyes darted back and forth between the two of you as you made diffident small talk over drinks. His arm curled around her shoulders, and his fingers idly stroked her arm, but he never said a word as you felt each other out. He just sipped his beer and rolled his shoulders to dispel knots of tension._

_She was quiet, but polite. She spoke only when spoken to and volunteered information only after careful consideration, and there was a strange lilt to her voice that you couldn't quite place, an elongation of vowels that stood in sharp contrast to the throttled-dipthong _aw _of New York. She reminded you of a cat settling back on its haunches, inscrutable and wary. She watched your mouth and the languid movement of your fingers over the chilled rim of your glass, and though her lips twitched in fleeting smiles upon occasion, you sensed the hiss behind the laughter. She never leaned on the table, never got closer than an arm's length. She never let go of the kid's hand, but she didn't kiss him or cast doe-eyed glances at him during lulls in the conversation, either. She was utterly reserved and focused entirely on you. It made you uneasy, and you were relieved when she excused herself to play a game of pool at the nearby billiard table._

What d'you think of my girl, Gav? _the kid asked a few minutes later. He had turned his chair so that he could have an unobstructed view of both you and the pool table, and he was watching her with barely-concealed pride._

_It didn't occur to you until years later that what he'd really been askin' for that night was your approval. _Hey, Pop, here's my girl. D'you like her? _It broke your heart that he'd come to you for it and not his old man, but to tell the truth, you weren't that surprised. You'd known Flack Sr. from the department, and he was a notorious hardass. It didn't take much of an imagination to guess how hard he'd ridden his only son, but given the way the kid reacted when they were in a room together or talked about him when they weren't, you wondered just how far he'd gone._

_You almost asked him once, on one of those nights where you were workin' up the nerve to go see Anita and Hector for a few minutes. It was December and cold as hell, and you wanted to be sure they had enough money to keep the heat on. The heater in the squad car was on the fritz and kept crappin' out, so you were freezin' your balls off. Flack was slouched in the passenger seat with a cup of coffee pinched between his knees, and every few minutes, he'd slap the heater with his gloved hand._

Fuckin' piece'a shit, _he'd snarl, and bundle himself into his heavy department jacket again._

Everything all right with you, kid? _you asked casually._

_He eyed you warily over the upturned tongue of his collar. _Aside from freezin' my dick off, you mean? Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?

Because you went over to your folks' for dinner last night, and every time that happens, you spend the next week pissin' in everybody's cornflakes, _you thought, but you just shrugged and said, _You just seemed edgy, is all.

Christ, it's fuckin' ten degrees outside, and my balls look like Papa Smurf's, and this fuckin' heater won't work. _He fiddled irritably with the lever that governed the temperature. _I'm tellin' you, Gavin, if I get frostbite on my balls, I'm suin' the fuckin' department. _He nudged the lever to full-bore, but the heater only coughed and sputtered into silence. _Shit.

_You bit the inside of your cheek to keep from laughin' at the image of him writin' _scrotal frostbite _on his disability claim forms and said, _All right, kid. I just thought that maybe you and your old man had it out over-

Nothin' happened, _he said flatly_. Just dinner and the usual bullshit.

_You opened your mouth to ask about what the usual bullshit entailed, but then he looked at you, and you decided against it. His eyes were stony and opaque, and his mouth was a thin, colorless line._

Kid-,

Nothin' happened, _he repeated stubbornly, and stared out the windshield. You heard the words behind the words well enough: _Don't make me talk about it, Pop. I don't wanna. I _can't._

_So you didn't. Half an hour later, you left him sittin' in the car while you went to check on Anita and Hector and give 'em fifty bucks, and when you came back twenty minutes later, he was dumpin' the dregs of his coffee out the door and swearin' at the cock-suckin' heater. He never asked where you'd been or what you'd been doin', and you never asked him about dinner with his folks again._

_You always thought maybe you should have. Maybe then you coulda slapped some of the stupid ideas and insecurities outta his head before they had a chance to take root, but you had your own secret to protect, and you didn't want to be a goddamned hypocrite. So you let it go, and all those years later, he was in Sullivan's askin' your blessin' to get married, and you never saw it until later. In a perverse way, it made you proud because it meant he loved you as much as you loved him._

She always like that? _you asked before you could stop yourself, and he paused with his beer bottle halfway to his mouth._

Like what? _Cautious and ready to take offense._

Like an Ewok with a hemorrhoid problem, _you thought, but you settled for the more diplomatic, _Standoffish.

_He relaxed and took a sip of beer. _Ah, don't worry about it. She's like that with everybody she don't know. Don't think she likes the attention.

_You thought that over. _So, how'd you meet her?

_Donnie brightened at that. _Now that is a funny fuckin' story. _He laughed and leaned forward, arms crossed on the table. _I was chasin' this asshole down 34th. Bastard was wanted on a murder rap. Anyways, we were comin' up on a crosswalk, and she was waitin' to cross. Everybody gets outta the way but her. She's tryin', but Flash Gordon, she ain't. The perp hits her broadside and knocks her outta her chair. He winds up with a broken leg, and she winds up with a busted wrist, and I'm standin' in the middle'a all the body parts, convinced I'm gonna get sued outta my shorts. _He laughed again and watched her as she pulled herself to her feet by the edge of the pool table and reached for the cue ball._

I take it you didn't get sued.

Naw. I did get my ass handed to me when I showed up in the hospital parkin' lot and told her that we got the guy for assault on a disabled person. Don't think she liked havin' her own category. _He snorted. _She let me give her a ride home, though, and she told me after we'd been goin' a while that the department had sent her official letters of apology and alla that shit.

How long you been goin'?

A year. _He cast a momentary glance at the Sportscenter on the TV over the bar and then resumed his vigil over his girl as she rolled the cueball over the felt of the pool table and flopped back into her chair with an airy fart of cushion. Her gracelessness didn't faze him. In fact, his lips curved in a fond smirk._

She's gonna bust her ass doin' that, _you told him._

_He shook his head. _No, she isn't, _he said. _'Sides, if she does, she'll get up again. Unless fifty well-meanin' lunkheads rush to pick her up before she can do it herself.

It's serious, then?

_A slow, single nod. _Damn straight, it is. I asked her to marry me last week.

_He could have knocked you over with a feather. All you could do was gape at him and grope for your glass of beer. _No shit, _you said incredulously. _She say yes?

_He looked at you as if you'd asked him what your name was and rolled his beer bottle between his palms. _'Course she said yes. You think I brought you here to show you what I couldn't have? _He shook his head in wry amusement. _You're slippin', Gav. _He clapped you on the shoulder._

I ain't slippin', _you muttered gruffly, and swirled the contents of your stein._

_You knew congratulations were in order, and you wanted to give them, but you couldn't quite believe that the girl he was gonna settle down with was so different than the girls that usually caught his eye. Part of it was the chair, yeah-you were only human, and you couldn't help but wonder how they did it, and if they did, how they intended to raise kids-but mostly, it was her personality. The kid had always liked perky girls with easy laughs and lots of sass, and this girl had neither. As far as you could tell, she was aloof and meek._

What is it, Gav? _he said shrewdly. _You don't seem too happy for me.

Naw, kid, naw, _you said hastily. _'S good. I'm just kinda surprised, is all. Frankly, she just don't seem like your type.

Why? 'Cause she's smart, or 'cause of the wheels underneath her ass? _he asked bitterly, and took a long swig of beer._

_The venom in his voice startled you, and you sat back in your chair and raised your hands in a placatory gesture. _Hey, woah, kid. Who said anythin' about that? I could give a fuck. I just pictured you with some Italian girl from the South Bronx or even Philly. Somebody who could grab you by the balls if you got outta line.

_His shoulders slumped, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. _Yeah, I know. I didn't mean to fuckin' snap. But fuck, Gav, every time I mention it, they always follow up their congratulations by askin' if I'm sure of what I'm getting into. Like she's a used car, and I should be worried about buyin' a lemon. _He snorted_ _in disgust. _Christ, nobody knows what they're getting into when they get married, do they? Just once, it'd be nice if somebody'd be fuckin' happy for me and leave it at that.

What about your folks?

_His lips thinned, and a muscle in his jaw twitched, but he said nothing._

Does she do it for you? _Blunt, almost crude._

_He raised both eyebrows. _You mean sexually?

I mean any way, kid.

_For the first time since his girl had wandered to the pool table, you had his undivided attention. He set his beer on the table and pushed it away. He leaned on the table, elbows extended and palms flat on the surface._

You have no idea, _he said simply. _She looks at me, and I feel like a million bucks, and it doesn't matter if I've just chased some scumbag through six inches of sewer bilge. She thinks I hung the moon, and I hope to God she never finds out I can't.

_You saw her over his shoulder, bony ass stuck out like a turkey in a shakepole fence, nose scrapin' the green felt as her spidery fingers closed over the cue ball and dragged it towards her. You had no idea what game she was playing. You'd never seen anything remotely resembling it in a pool handbook, and she had only managed to pocket three balls so far. But she was going at it with grim determination, teeth bared and eyes flashing, and her hair was spun gold as it fanned over the felt._

Then grab her with both hands and don't let go, _you said at last_. Congratulations, kid.

_A year later, you walked her down the aisle as a favor to the kid, and she trembled like a leaf on your arm, a low-grade shiver that made the baby's breath in her hair dance. She was china and lace and giddy nerves, and she flashed you a quicksilver smile through her veil as you placed her cold, unsteady hand in Donnie's. She leaned against him at the altar, and when his arm curled around her waist to brace her, the shiverin' stopped. Just like that, and you thought as you stepped back that it was because she'd found her clean, well-lighted place. _

_It was a candyass thing to think at the kid's weddin' somethin' some Poindexter would say at the toast, but you couldn't stop thinkin' it. It seemed apt, just like it did when you heard it for the first time in English class one sweltering spring afternoon. It was a miracle you heard it, considerin' you were too busy tryin' to Kreskin your way through Betty Janson's blouse, but it slipped through the filter and lodged in the back of your mind like a pebble, and over the years, you'd find it and turn it over in your palm a while, a tiny worry stone. You'd see an old couple shufflin' down the street hand-in-hand, and you'd think, _There goes somebody with a clean, well-lighted place. _It was what you thought when you met Andrea, and what you thought when one of your girls climbed onto your lap to watch TV._

_The kid had found his place, too, and he didn't care that it wasn't stately or grand. She was his, and he loved her. It was in the way he was beamin' when the priest presented them as Mr. and Mrs. Donald Flack, Jr. at the altar. He looked twenty beneath the oiled bill of his uniform cap, and he was reverent as he helped her to her feet and let her lean on him until her chair could be maneuvered into position. It was in the way he danced with her at the reception, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be dancin' with your bride's feet Velcro'd to your shoes. With her, he was graceful and dainty, and you wondered how you coulda missed it._

_He was over the moon, and you pitied his parents their dour expressions at the bridal table. To be fair, his old man at least had a glimmer of understanding. His lips curved in the merest hint of a smile as his son whirled around the smooth, ballroom floor with his bride, and when she shyly asked him for a dance, he smoothed his uniform coat and obliged. He was almost as gentle with her as his son, and he patted her thin shoulder when the music ended. Mrs. Flack just sat in her chair and stewed, ventin' her ill-concealed anger on a cocktail napkin._

_It didn't take the kid long to settle into married life. Not long after the weddin' you and Andrea got a lovely thank-you note from Rebecca for the silver set and the check to help 'em get started. Donnie still stopped by for dinner every few months, but now he brought his wife. She was still quiet, and sometimes Andrea would complain that she wasn't interested in neighborhood gossip or clothes or swappin' recipes, but she was polite, and if she ever sensed that you wanted to talk to Donnie alone, she kissed him on the forehead and went to admire Andrea's windowboxes._

_Who knows how long the happy arrangement woulda lasted if you hadn't been called to that shitty bodega or hadn't heard the dyin' declaration of a shop owner who fingered your bastard son as the trigger man? Maybe you wouldn't have had to drop out of his life for the past three and a half years. But squattin' over that vic, you made your choice, and with a slick-fingered scribble of your pen, you imposed your own sentence._

_You ain't never gonna forget the look on his face when he walked into the precinct that afternoon. Heartsick and broken and lost, as though some mean-spirited prick had told him there was no heaven, and that all dogs went to hell. He wanted you to say it wasn't true even though he knew it was, but you couldn't. You just looked at him and asked if he was gonna use the cuffs._

Naw, _he said quietly. _You and me are gonna walk outside like we're goin' for a smoke, _and that's exactly the way it was._

_He took you for bookin' at another precinct, and he offered to do the fingerprintin' and photo'in himself, but he was pale and subdued, and when he talked, he sounded gut-punched. You didn't wanna twist the knife in his gut no more, and you didn't want him seein' you bein' mug-shotted in your uniform, so you refused. He looked at you with anguished gratitude and didn't come back until you were out in the hallway, tryin' to wipe the ink from your fingers with a cheap paper towel._

_He walked you home, hands stuffed into the pockets of his pants. He never said a word about what happened, but you could feel the unasked question against your skin, humidity and sticky heat. _Why didn't you tell me? _Wounded and bewildered and too much when all you could think of was how you were going to explain all of this to a wife who had stood by you through twenty-three years of missed dinners, and how naked you were gonna feel without that blue uniform on your back._

_He was the one who took the uniforms away for you. He came by the apartment after the department had decided to make the whole incident disappear by granting you early retirement and a drastically reduced pension. He stood in your livin' room and pretended not to notice the holes where Andrea's things had been. You brought both your dress blues and your regulation blues, and he didn't fuckin' insult you by inventoryin' the contents. He just took the garment bags, hooked 'em over his shoulder, promised to call you for a beer in the next few days, and left._

_He did, too. The kid was nothin' if not a man of his word, and it meant the world to you that he still wanted anything to do with you after you'd pissed on the uniform you'd taught him to uphold. So you went, because he was your kid, and because you wanted somethin' in your life to be the same, to be fuckin' normal. But it wasn't. It couldn't be._

_The bar he took you to wasn't Sullivan's, for one thing, and while you were grateful that you didn't have to see how quickly the line you'd been a part of for twenty-five years had closed to swallow your place in it, your nose kept sniffin' for the smells of gunmetal and leather oil and listenin' for the lingo of the job. But it was nothin' but yuppies and Average Joes, and even the beer tasted different, more sterile._

_The kid tried hard, but there were too many minefields to navigate, and all roads led back to the job. You'd start talkin' sports, and he'd go along for a while, and suddenly, he'd remember a case where some loser killed his best friend over a twenty-dollar sports bet. He'd launch into the story, hunched earnestly over the table, hands trying to keep up with his animated mouth. Then he'd realize that he was back to the job again and grind to a mortified halt._

But you don't wanna hear about that, _he'd mutter hastily, and study the foam in his beer. _Hey, did ya hear about Soriano maybe wantin' a trade?

_But you did wanna hear. You were an addict jonesin' for smack, desperate for stories from the life you used to live. Excommunication was agony, but watchin' your kid flounder for subjects that wouldn't remind you of it was ten times worse. So you started makin' excuses when he called. For a while, you let the machine take the calls, but that was too much like bein' a pussy douchebag, so you started pickin' up the phone again and tellin' him you were under the weather or expectin' a visit from your girls. He knew you were blowin' him off, but he wasn't goin' to give up on you so easy, and he kept callin'._

_Then you got wind through some old department hairbag that IAB was sniffin' around your old cases, lookin' for "improprieties". They were goin' all the way back to where you started, and if even one citation was outta whack, all your good collars would go down the toilet. It chapped your ass because you knew they were good nabs, but you understood it as the wages of sin._

_But then the hairbag told you they were pullin' the kid's record from his time with you, and that was bullshit. The kid was clean. He never knew about Anita and Hector. You made sure of that. You tried to visit 'em when he wasn't around, and if you couldn't, you left him in the squad car. No more than twenty minutes, ever. If he suspected you were pullin' off for a project quickie, he kept his mouth shut._

_So you knew what you had to do, and the next time he invited you out for a beer and wouldn't take no for an answer, you busted his chops, told him to leave you the fuck alone. What the fuck was wrong with him? Or did he just like rubbin' your face in the fact that you weren't one'a them no more?_

_Absolute silence on the other end of the line. Then, _Gav, I-, _Stunned, and you could see him in your mind's eye, blinkin' and tryin' desperately to figure out what the fuck was goin' on. _

Go fuck yourself, kid, _you swore, and prayed he'd mistake the rasp in your voice for anger and not misery at what you were doin' to him._

_Another long quiet. _All right. That the way it is for us now? _Flat, mechanical, but you could hear the muscle in his jaw twitchin'. _I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Moran. It won't happen again. _Then he hung up, and you went into the kitchen and drank until you passed out at the table. You never heard from the kid again._

Then the phone had rung while he was fixing lunch. He almost hadn't answered it because he had a mayonnaise-slathered knife in one hand and a slice of rye bread in the other, but something had made him shoulder the receiver out of its cradle at the last minute.

"'Lo," he'd grunted, expecting another bill collector, but then the operator had come on the line and asked if he'd accept the charges from a Rebecca Flack, and the knife had slipped from his fingers and clattered on the ridged linoleum.

His first thought was that the kid had been killed in the line, and she was calling to break it to him and ask if he'd be a pallbearer. He'd lurched backward until his ass had found the narrow edge of his kitchen table, and he'd sat down with a thump. He'd accepted the call, closed his eyes, and waited for the hammer to fall.

But the kid was all right, she'd assured him. It was her that needed help, and from the sound of her voice, he'd believed her. It had been weak and raw and slurred, like she'd just awakened from a deep, nightmare-plagued sleep or was fighting not to fall into one. Could he meet her at Grand Central Station as soon as he could? She'd be waiting, and please hurry, because she was in trouble.

He'd hung up the phone, slipped a t-shirt over his ragged undershirt, and left without cleaning up his unfinished sandwich. It was still there, wilting in the heat, and he'd have to throw out the mayonnaise when he got back. He was halfway there now and closing fast, and his t-shirt clung to his back like molting skin.

He still couldn't figure why she was calling him after all these years. Why not call Don? That kid would have charged through Hell in an asbestos suit to get to her if she was in trouble.

_Same reason you don't call him now and try to mend fences. Pride. You don't want him to see you like this, runnin' to fat and whiskey and goin' gray around the edges. You're outta shape and getting old, and you want him to remember you when you were still worth a shit._

It wouldn't surprise him in the least. Donnie's girl was one of the proudest, most stubborn people he had ever met. Once she set her metaphorical feet, she wasn't going any goddamned where, and never mind what anyone else thought. It was fascinating and overwhelming all at once, and most of the time, he could only stare and shake his head in amazement.

He'd learned of that single-mindedness first-hand when Donnie had asked him to give her away. He-Gavin-had offered to push her down the aisle, but she had insisted on holding his arm and rolling in step. She was his bride, not his brand-new stove, she'd countered indignantly, and she wasn't going to be delivered like a piece of merchandise.

So they'd practiced moving in tandem. Most of the time she'd met him on the sidewalk in front of his building, but sometimes, she had come to the precinct, and they'd paced the sidewalk between the green lanterns, counting paces and turns of the wheel. Back and forth, and back and forth, and occasionally, the rookies would come out to watch the strange ballet, curled on the stone banisters of the precinct stairs like curious, milk-glutted kittens.

"Enjoyin' your dancin' lessons, Moran?" one would call, and blow cigarette smoke from his nostrils, and Rebecca would tuck her chin and resolutely mark off the rolls.

It was hopeless at first. His strides were too long, or her rolls were too short, or vice versa. Or the pace was too fast or jerky or slow. For the first three weeks, they'd looked like a pair of drunk snails trying to have a footrace, and he'd pleaded with her once or twice to just let it go. After all, she was going to marry the kid either way, and if she asked him, he'd probably sit in a wheelchair, too, to make it easier. But every time he had broached the subject, she had fixed him with a gimlet-eyed glare, and that had been that.

Somewhere during the eighth week of practice in front of his building, they had found their rhythm, and he had found the pearl hoarded so deeply within the hard outer shell. It wasn't much, and it wasn't for long, but he would catch glimpses of it in a wry comment or a quick laugh as she timed her rolls. She had a wicked sense of humor when it struck her to use it, and he often found himself snorting and huffing laughter as they marched along the sidewalk two by two.

There was vulnerability, too, hidden beneath all those layers of cunning defense. He usually saw that when the kid came to pick her up from a practice. She would hear the sound of his voice and turn towards it joyfully, and then she would remember herself and lapse into red-faced silence.

"Sorry, Gavin," she'd mutter, and blush to the roots of her hair.

He'd always laughed it off because it was refreshing to see someone so unashamed of being in love. The kid would open his arms, and she'd roll merrily into them, laughing as she went. Sometimes, they'd come up for a beer and cold-cut sandwiches, but most of the time, they just waved goodbye and started for home, and he couldn't help but notice that they fell effortlessly into the easy rhythm it had taken him two months to find. He'd walked her down the aisle the following year, and his feet had been steady as a rock.

Now his feet were carrying him into the bustling darkness of Grand Central Station, past mothers with strollers and businessmen with luggage following in their inattentive wake like beaten dogs. They spared him disinterested glances or disdainful smirks, and even though it had been more than three years, he felt a surge of anger. They hadn't been so goddamned smug when he'd come walking through in his uniform, baton swinging from his belt and cap pulled low over his brow.

She was sitting by the bank of payphones, and when he found her, he could only stare. She was filthy and wearing a dingy hospital shift, and her stomach was enormous. Her hair hung in lank strings, and her face was sunburned.

"Oh, my God." It was all his tongue could say. This ragged, battered woman was not the determined sprite with whom he'd cantered and wobbled in front of the precinct stairs.

"Don't get too close. I smell," she croaked matter-of-factly, and when she looked up, he saw that she was crying.

"What happened? What're you doin' out here in a hospital gown? Where's Donnie?"

"I escaped from Trinity Hospital this morning. I don't know where Don is. I've left a dozen messages with the desk sergeant at the 33rd, but he never called me back."

"The 33rd? He get transferred outta the 14th?"

She snorted and shook her head. "He got tapped for that serial pervert taskforce, and that's when everything went to hell." She began to cry in earnest, arms wrapped protectively around her belly.

"Aw, shit. Don't do that, Rebecca, c'mon." He drew alongside her chair and squatted. He could smell her, unwashed hair and the musty smell of dried piss. His nose wrinkled in disgust.

"I told you," she said dully. "I haven't had a proper bath in six days."

His mind was racing. He wasn't a cop anymore, so he couldn't compel her to go, but it was obvious she couldn't stay here. She was dehydrated and distraught, and the stress couldn't be good for the baby. He touched the nape of her neck. It was sticky and feverish to the touch.

"Have you had any water?" he asked.

"I had a few gulps from the water fountain when I got here."

"Yeah, well, that ain't enough. Listen, Rebecca, you're badly dehydrated. You need the paramedics and some I.V. fluids. Let me get you a bus, and I'll find the kid myself, huh?"

A hand shot out and gripped his wrist, dry and gritty and possessed of that same fever heat. "No. No. Ambulances mean hospitals, and I'm not going back. They shot me full of sedative and strapped me to a bed."

"Rebecca-,"

"Don't look at me like that," she snapped. "Don looked at me the same way, and now look where I am. I have proof, but I can't get naked in the middle of Grand Central Station."

"How 'bout the bathroom, then?"

She considered that. "All right."

He stepped behind her and pushed her towards the bathrooms. It was clear that something had happened, but he wasn't sure what. She wasn't raving, but she wasn't making sense, either, and he suspected she was having a breakdown or suffering sunstroke-induced delusions. He'd take her into the bathroom, wipe her down in an effort to cool and calm her, and maybe he could talk her into going to the hospital. If not, he'd excuse himself and make the call anyway.

The bathroom was filthy, but mercifully deserted. He rolled her parallel to the sink and turned on the tap. "I see you're pregnant there," he said diffidently as he wet a paper towel and squeezed out the excess water.

In the finger-smeared mirror above the sinks, her reflection smiled. "Yeah. I'm due any time. The doctor says within the next ten to fourteen days, but I think sooner. It's not like Don and I only had sex once that month." She laughed. "Sorry. Don't guess you wanted to know that. Drugs have made me loopy."

He lifted her hair and slapped the sopping paper towel onto her nape and held it there. "Bet he must be over the moon."

Another smile. "Are you kidding? He's done nothing but fuss over me for eight months. When he found out we were having a boy, he ran out and bought Yankees booties and a cap. The cap was the smallest size they had, but I still don't think it's going to fit. 'Don't matter,' he says. 'Can never start 'em too young.' He was so happy, and that's why I don't understand why he put me in the hospital and _left _me there." Her face crumpled, and he was sure she was going to cry, but then it hardened, and she said, "No, that's bullshit. I do. I almost fell in the bathroom. He caught me, but I could see it in his face. I hoped he'd sleep on it and decide he could still take care of me, but the next morning, I knew."

He wet another towel and came around the front of her chair. He crouched in front of her. "I ain't tryin' to grope, but I gotta cool you off," he said, and raised her shift to expose her belly. He spread the sodden paper over it and felt the baby move. "There ya go, buddy. Ain't that better?"

"Take a look at the outside of my left thigh while you're there," she muttered.

It didn't take him long to find it. It was a massive red weal the size of his fist. He didn't have to touch it to know it was raw and tender. "Aw, God," he managed.

_Not as off her rocker as I thought. When the kid sees this, heads are gonna roll._

"It's not infected yet, but in another day or so, it would have ulcerated and gone septic from all the piss washing over it. There's another one on my left shoulder."

"You gotta document this, get the kid's science buddies in here with their cameras. You need to go to another hospital."

She shook her head. "No. Uh huh."

"Rebecca, this ain't the time to be stubborn. I can't deliver this baby in here if somethin' goes wrong. I don't know nothin' about your complications, and if I killed you or the baby, I couldn't live with that."

"I'm not asking you to, but I can't go back," she insisted.

"Dammit, it ain't just about you no more. It's about the baby, and about Donnie, who is probably goin' outta his fuckin' mind, worryin' about you."

She snorted. "Trust me. I'm not even a blip on his radar. Not since the task force."

Gavin Moran did something he had never done before. He slapped a woman in the face. Not hard, but enough to make his palm sting and her eyes widen.

Her hand rose to her cheek. "You-,"

"Now you listen to me," he hissed. "I thought you knew this already, but apparently you don't, or you forgot. That kid does what he does as hard as he does _because _of you. You know what he sees when he looks at a vic or the victim's family? He sees you. He sees you lyin' there with your head bashed in or your throat cut, and he sees you huddled in the livin' room or on the sidewalk in the rain. That's what he sees."

"And he swears to himself that ain't never goin' to be you. That's why he's runnin' himself ragged on this case, sleepin' in the rack room and sittin' in a car and missin' you for days on end. It's so he can make sure that that guy never has a chance to hurt you. When he finally catches that dirtbag, he ain't goin' to be thinkin' about medals or the citations that'll go in his police file. He's goin' to come home to you thinkin' that that's one less guy with the chance to hurt you. He put 'em away and kept you fuckin' safe, and he wants you to be proud of him for it."

"Now, you can sit here feelin' sorry for yourself, or you can pull your head outta your ass and think about him for a change."

She was gaping at him. Incredulous and more than a little stunned, as though she'd been roused from a long stupor and was trying to find herself. Her fingers absently rubbed the bloom of heat on her cheek.

"Let's go call my husband," she said.


	4. Late For A Very Important Date

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

He had never been inside his wife's office at NYU. When they were courting, he had sometimes come to hear her lecture, leaning against the back wall with his ankles and legs crossed as she paced the front of the room. He hadn't understood a word of it, but he'd loved the chance to see her as an entity apart from him, in her element. For all her shyness at social gatherings or group dates, she exuded confidence in a classroom. She sat straighter and spoke more crisply, and there was a definite cocky swagger to the snap of her arms as she propelled herself across the floor. She was a goddess of numbers, and she knew it, and that surety was sexy as hell.

But her office was her inner sanctum, her private place where she could go to be who she was and had been before she put on the carefully-lacquered veneer of a cop's wife, and though she had invited him to see it numberless times over the years, he had never set foot in it. Not because he was uninterested, but because he hadn't wanted to taint it with his presence.

_You wanted it to be just hers, a place where she wouldn't have to worry about being perfectly buttoned and primped or have to dumb down the way she talked for thick cop ears. She could come here and know that she wasn't gonna find you sittin' in her chair or standin' on her carpet with blood on your shoes and some meat-headed cop beside you. She could read her books and discuss her theories without worryin' that she was leavin' you behind._

_After all, you had your own place down at the blacktop courts across from the precinct. You and Messer and other cops could go there before or after a shift and toss the ball around. You could throw elbows and say _cocksucker _and _motherfucker _and _cunt-faced dickhead _to your heart's content and not feel like you were doin' somethin' dirty. You could make tit jokes and talk cars and motorcycles and sexual fantasies and not worry about hurtin' her feelin's. You could sweat and draw blood and go out for a few beers, blow off steam. After a thorough shower, you were ready to go home and be as gentle with her as you needed to be._

_Those spaces weren't big, but they were enough to deflect blows that might otherwise be mortal. You had a sanctuary if the fightin' got too heavy, and you could take the time to breathe and regroup before meetin' in the middle to try to work it out. They kept love from becomin' a noose and sourin' the joy you felt when you rolled over and saw each other in the mornin'. You still remembered who you were, and that made love all the sweeter._

He stood in the middle of her office now, and his chest cramped with longing. She was everywhere, his girl, and he wanted to see her in her rightful place behind the desk, flipping idly through a mathematics journal or pecking intently at her keyboard. She was in the stubby shelves, made lower so that she could reach them without craning, and in the haphazard jumble of books, folders, and papers scattered around the room. She was in the lack of carpeting on the floor and in the potted sunflower on the windowsill, drooped and dispirited without her to tend it.

It was the first place he had thought to come after he had wandered from Trinity into the sweltering heat of a New York summer. The janitor had told him to go where the magic was, and where else could it be but here? Numbers were magical in his Rebecca's hands, and she loved to play with them, turn them in her narrow, cold hands and mold them into imaginings of tomorrow or the concrete realities of today. She could take a string of numbers, bland and craggy and flaccid on the whiteboard, and transform them into threads of electric possibility-a rocket or new medical technology. She was a storyteller without words, and he had seen her magic in the eyes of some of her students, eager and fearless and captivated by her maybes.

So he had come here at a dead run, sure that when he burst through the door, he would find her, huddled and sore and angry at his abandonment, but swaddled in her cocoon of numbers. Her eyes would be raw and wet with tears, but there would be a dry-erase board balanced on her knees and black smudges of marker on her fingertips. She would be writing a lullaby of numbers to Junior, and as soon as the spiteful, burning finger of a vengeful God pulled itself from his throbbing side, he would gather her up and take care of them both.

And he'd been right. She _had _been here, in the walls and the bare floor and the dying sunflower, in everything but the flesh. Hints of her caressed his nostrils and the sensitive flesh of his nape, perfume and teasing fingertips and the lambskin and bonding glue of her degrees. He closed his eyes and tilted his chin, the better to taste her on the stale air.

"Where are you, doll?" he asked the empty room full of whispering ghosts. "Where you hidin'?"

_There are other places she could be, _Gavin reasoned with stoic practicality. _Maybe she went to that diner on 34th Street where you had your first dates over shitty coffee that tasted like charcoal and ambrosia at the same time. It's where she first felt the pull of attraction, and that's magic, ain't it? Maybe she's standin' on 34th in the spot where she broke her wrist and saw you chargin' in on a steed of leather dress shoes._

_If that spot didn't hold enough magic for her, maybe she went to St. Patrick's Cathedral. What's a weddin' if not magic? Even you felt it, a surge of frisson when I put her hand in yours at the altar. It was in the kiss, too, a heady current that prickled in your meetin' lips and twinin' tongues and tightened your balls inside your uniform pants. She gave herself to you in more ways than one that day, and you felt the union in the pit of your stomach, a dizzyin' drop that made you a little seasick for a few minutes as you were holdin' her up and waitin' for Messer to set the brakes on her chair so you could sit her in it._

_She felt somethin', too. She was thrummin' with it the whole Mass, taut as piano wire underneath her dainty gown. You were worried she was gonna faint or puke or both, and you kept tightenin' your grip around her waist so she wouldn't fall forward and smash her face or backwards and crack her skull. She stayed upright, though, fingers clamped around your forearm hard enough to cut the blood supply and vibratin' and clammy with nervous energy. She was so enthralled by what she was feelin' that the priest had to ask her twice if she would and did, and then you were the one about to pass out._

_Maybe she's at the church, sittin' by the front pew and relivin' the day she got to be the belle of the ball. She's probably watchin' herself roll down the aisle and wonderin' if you thought she was as beautiful as she felt. Or maybe she's just glad your ma didn't ruin the moment by objectin' when the opportunity presented itself. She could be there lightin' a votive candle for herself and the baby and prayin' that it'll be all right._

_Or maybe it's like Stella said and she went home. It's where the heart is and the place that when you go there, they have to take you in, right? If any magic exists, it's there. You've spent six years makin' a life with her in that apartment, makin' do in the cramped spaces and sharp corners. You've watched TV and made dinner together in its rooms, and with every steak you've grilled or pot of homemade soup you've simmered on the stove, you've created more magic. You made it by lovin' and fightin' and laughin' so hard you nearly pissed yourselves. Sometimes, you even did, but who cared, because that meant a lingerin' shower with roamin' fingers and sloppy, soapy kisses. Magic is everywhere in that tiny apartment, in the walls and carpet and shower curtain, and especially in the bed linens that have caught more feverish, desperate _I love yous _than anything else. Magic permeates every fiber of those sheets, and a wounded animal returns to the place it feels safest. For all you know, she's curled beneath the sheets in your bed, dozin' and rubbin' her belly and waitin' for you to find her._

It was a comforting thought, and he wanted so badly to cling to it, but he was a cop, and he knew better. Rebecca couldn't go home even if she wanted to. Her ID and apartment keys were sealed in plastic evidence bags and nestled in the front seat of Stella's SUV, and she couldn't get into the building without them. At best, she could sit beneath the awning and pray the doorman didn't recognize her.

_Ain't that a bitch? _sneered a vicious, gleeful voice inside his head. _It's déjà vu all over again. You know all about ID in evidence bags because your sister's is in one, too, and every year, you take it out of its cardboard evidence box and cradle it in your hands. You look at the flat, 2D picture and the dry statistics of her life as it was lived in those fourteen years, and you ponder how fuckin' unfair it is that that's all people are ever gonna remember about Diana Elizabeth Flack. Why didn't the guy printin' up the ID remember to add that she'd been smarter than you by half, or that she liked lavender even though you hated it?_

_It was good practice for when Stella comes to tell you the bad news. You'll know exactly what it means when she comes down the hall with the plastic bag in one hand and the consolation cup of coffee in the other. There won't be any need for beatin' around the bush. Hell, it'll be the easiest death notification she'll ever have to do. She won't have to say a word. She'll hand you the coffee and you won't drink it, and then she'll hand you the bag and leave you to absorb the blow of that pair of golden rings sittin' in the bottom. After you've been starin' at that tiny diamond on the engagement ring for too long, Stella'll come back and tell you it's time, and you'll know exactly what she means. You'll get up and walk to the morgue on feet that have detached themselves from your body and are drifting ahead of you, and when you get there, a solemn Hammerback will draw back the sheets and break your heart._

_Don't listen to that bullshit, kid, _Gavin admonished brusquely. _That ain't goin' to happen. Your girl is tough and resourceful and smart. If she wasn't, the old bitch at Trinity wouldn't have tried to dope the rebellion outta her and truss her up like an unruly cow. She's lyin' low somewhere, in a part of the city where nobody knows her face. Maybe she's trundlin' through Hell's Kitchen or Spanish Harlem or lurkin' in the cool shadows of a Bowery Alley._

_Or maybe she went back to the river and the spot where you made your son. Maybe she maneuvered herself outta her chair and is sittin' on the bank with her toes in the water, lettin' the magic lap at her skin and rinse it clean._

His skin flushed and prickled with the intoxicating memory of hers, and his palms cupped in gentle remembrance of the curve of her breasts. She had been so sweet that night, brown sugar and honey on his tongue, and pliant, and laughing, laughing as he'd moved against her. It had been a relaxed, languid coupling in the back of the SUV, and her fingers had traced intricate patterns on his flesh-whorls on his forearms and undulating, serpentine _S_s on his back, a figure-eight on the sweaty, taut flesh between their bodies. Her hands had been cool and hot all at once, and the dueling sensations had created delicious tension in the pit of his stomach and between his legs.

_And her teeth, of course. She didn't bite you that time. She just craned her head and sucked the delicate skin of your throat between her teeth in a gentle nip. She trembled with the effort of keepin' perfectly still and not exertin' any more pressure no matter how deeply you thrust. Her hands continued tracin' their hypnotic patterns and scorin' 'em with the points of her nails, and she whined deep in her throat when you drove into her, but her mouth remained absolutely motionless, a hand grenade balanced on the head of a pin. You concentrated on the scrape of her teeth against your Adam's apple to prolong the pleasure as long as you could._

_And then the muscles in her thighs and cunt started to twitch and tighten, and the whimpers became keens and full-throated moans. The measured, implacable rhythm of her hands faltered and stopped altogether as she scrabbled for your shoulders. Her tongue darted between her teeth to flick the hollow of your throat, and that was all it took. The world went white, and all you could do was balance on your elbows while the center of your universe tilted and plunged ruthlessly into your spasming cock. It was exquisite and terrible, and you couldn't breathe because all your muscles had locked. Rebecca let go of your throat and buried her face in the crook of your neck. Through the rush of blood in your ears, you heard her howling unashamedly. You moved your elbows in to keep her from hurting herself while she bucked and thrashed and twisted underneath you._

_It took a long time for you both to come down, and the only sound in the car was panting and gulping and the furtive rustle of shifting bodies. You tried to move off her and let her stretched muscles relax, but she murmured nonsense syllables of protest and wrapped her arms around your neck, and so you stayed there and planted butterfly kisses along the bony ridge of her collarbone and lazily suckled a nipple until her heartbeat slowed to a lazy larrup beneath your lips._

_You were tempted to spend the night there, curled into one another like contented cats, but it got cold when the wind blew off the river in mid-October, and the thin wool blanket you'd brought wasn't enough to keep her warm. So you got dressed and bundled her into the blanket, and when you got her home, you fed her grilled ham and cheese and a hot cup of tomato soup. You slept like logs that night, and the next day, you returned the SUV to the department requisition lot. If anyone noticed that it smelled like sex, they never mentioned it, and shortly after Thanksgiving, she came to you with a positive EPT._

He could feel her and smell her and taste her, and when he opened his eyes, he realized that his cheeks were wet. He swiped hastily at his face with his palms and took a deep breath.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," he said bitterly, disgusted with himself. All his life, he'd been looking out for the helpless and people too stupid to know any better, and now that his wife was counting on him to hold it together and come through for her, he was standing in her office and crying like an impotent, useless asshole.

He should leave, walk out of her office and scour every inch of the city until he found her. He knew every inch of the city and its outlying boroughs, from Queens to Staten Island to Yonkers and Westchester County, where he'd chased Diana through the grimy streets and slapped his winter-mittened hands on frozen, wrought-iron poles as he passed. He and Gavin had toured every crumbling niche, crackhouse, and derelict alley in the city's forgotten backwaters, and he knew where the frightened and broken went to ground when the shadows grew too long or the searchlights grew too bright. He could find the secret places and turn them upside-down and inside out. He could cup his hands to his mouth and call to her, and if she would answer to no one else, she would answer him.

_Because she's always answered you. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she came when you called. Even when she was three thousand miles away. Like last year, when she went to a mathematician's conference in L.A.. She asked if you wanted to go, but you were in the middle of a hot case, and besides, you hated the thought of standin' in a room full of people who were smarter than you and knew it. So you dropped her off at LaGuardia and kissed her goodbye, and even though you knew she was gonna be okay, your heart twisted to see her trundling down the concourse with her luggage in tow. She looked so small in the sea of people, and in the back of your mind, you worried about earthquakes and gang violence._

_You made her promise to call you every night when she got back to the hotel, and she did. There were no earthquakes or shootings; in fact, she was havin' the time of her life, getting to chew the fat with other number nerds, and you were a little jealous when she told you about finally meetin' Charlie Eppes, the Cal-Sci professor who she'd been correspondin' with for years. But mostly, you just missed her, her breath on your neck and her knees in your kidneys while you slept._

_On the third night, you mentioned how much you missed her. You didn't mean to, but the case you were workin' had gone to shit, and you had a sinus infection that was makin' your head throb. You wished she was there to talk to and to make you a pack for your face. You had no idea what was in it, and when you prodded her about it, all she would say was that she'd learned it in school. It was warm and smelled of herbs, and an hour after she applied it to your face, you could sleep without pain, and the next morning, the infection would begin to drain._

_You told her you missed her and loved her and couldn't wait to see her, and she blew you kisses and hung up. At four o'clock in the morning, you awoke to the sound of the front door opening, and when you staggered into the living room, there she was, nudging the door open and pulling her luggage across the threshold._

They were a bunch of tight-asses anyway, _she said by way of explanation, and marched into the kitchen._

_She fixed you a cup of tea and coaxed you into drinking it with a liberal application of honey, and while you grimaced and took ginger sips, she rolled around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and infusing herbs and making small talk that required no answer. Sometimes, she paused in her traversal of the kitchen to kiss you or smooth her thumbs over your swollen sinuses._

_An hour later, she pressed the poultice to your face, and the relief was so exquisite that you wanted to cry. She chivvied you toward the bedroom, and it was only when she yawned that you realized how exhausted she must be. You scooped her out of her chair and carried her into the bedroom, and within twenty minutes, you were both asleep._

_The next day, you awoke to a pillow covered in discolored mucus and the glorious ability to breathe. Rebecca was sprawled bonelessly on her side of the bed, oblivious to the biohazard you'd unleashed inches from her unsuspecting head. Her face was smooth and untroubled, and her hair was golden flax in the sunlight that streamed through the curtains. You eased out of bed and consigned the pillowcase to the hamper, and then you padded into the kitchen to make her brunch. You were on the four to midnight shift, but you could make the time to do this for her. You made her an omelet and tea and chopped apples and carried it in on a tray, and you split it over conversation and the newspaper. She tasted of apples and warm sugar when you kissed her goodbye a few hours later, and the next morning, when she should have been listening to a lecture on the potential applications for non-Euclidean geometry in a zero-gravity environment, she was rollin' hand-in-hand with you around the block and chasin' spoonfuls of strawberry gelato._

His feet were moving now, but not towards the door. Instead, they carried him to the wall adorned with her various pictures, plaques, and degrees. There was her undergraduate degree from FSU, garnet and cream and embossed with a golden seal and shadow-boxed with her _magna cum laude _tassel. Then her Masters in Advanced Mathematics from NYU, earned the year after they married. He'd been there for that ceremony, nervous and uncomfortable in his badge and gun. But he'd been ferociously proud of her, too. His heart had thudded painfully against his ribcage when she was announced as "Rebecca Flack, _magna cum laude". _It had been the first time he'd heard the name spoken in an official capacity, and it had taken a formidable act of will not to jump on his chair and announce to the assembly that there went his wife, dammit. She'd given him her _magna cum laude _tassel to commemorate the occasion, and it still hung in his locker at the precinct, right beside a photo of their wedding day.

Lastly, there was her Doctorate, an enormous document that, for some ridiculous reason, reminded him of the Constitution or the Magna Carta. Maybe it was the calligraphy or the ornate, flourished signature at the bottom. He'd been there for that, too, and he could still remember the way she had beamed at him as the Department Chair of Mathematics had slipped the purple collar around her black gown, as if to say, _Here I am, babe. Did I do it good? Are you proud of me?_ He couldn't remember now if he'd told her he was, but he had been, and as she'd sat on the dais and shaken hands with the Department Chair and the dissertation panel that had granted her doctorate, he could only marvel that she was the woman who'd agreed to marry him.

He'd spent the next two weeks calling her Dr. Flack when he came home, and when Hawkes had poked his head into the CSI break room one day to announce that he-Flack-had a phone call from a Dr. Rebecca Flack, he'd ducked his head, grinned like a fool, and blushed to the roots of his hair. It was rare that his girl had a chance to preen, and it had been his private pleasure to watch her swan around the apartment and revel in her hard-earned success.

_Hawkes still calls her Dr. Flack whenever they meet at the labs, and you're torn between pride and jealousy whenever you hear it because it's another commonality between them. They might be in different fields, but it's a bond all the same. Smart is smart, whether it's in guts or geometry, and it recognizes itself in the face of another, just like cops can make each other on the street without flashin' badges. Besides, the Drs. Hawkes has a ring to it that makes you uneasy._

There were plaques on the wall, black and silver and bronze, and he craned for a closer look. _Teacher of the Year in Mathematics 2006; Teacher of the Year in Mathematics 2007; Teacher of the Year in Mathematics 2008; Award for Meritorious Service to Her Students and Academic Excellence Above the Call of Duty 2007_. He stared at them in mute stupefaction.

"Oh, doll," he said, and his fingers reached out to caress the fine, filigreed, silver lettering. He swallowed a lump in his throat. "How come you didn't tell me about these?"

_Maybe she did, and you just weren't listenin', _his father suggested. _It's easy to do when you're chasin' leads. The world gets blinkered, whittled to nothin' but the image of that bastard butcherin' someone else before you can take 'em down. You go deaf and dumb and blind, and the case is your universe. Two weeks later, you're standin' in your kitchen, wonderin' why your wife and son won't talk to you and why your little girl sounds like she's on the verge of cryin' or pukin'._

_You know all about that, don't you?_ murmured the voice of bitter resentment. _You remember those mornin's spent in the kitchen with nobody talkin' because Pop had fucked up again. The scrape of Diana's spoon against the side of her cereal bowl and the way she crunched Rice Krispies like gravel between her teeth while staring stolidly at the salt shaker. Your Ma clearin' her throat between sips of coffee as if she was tryin' to start a conversation but had forgotten how the melody went. You used to sit in your chair and wish he'd die. At least then he'd have an excuse for missin' ballgames and piano recitals and makin' your sister cry. Then you'd hate yourself for even thinkin' it, because he was your fuckin' father, and what would your Ma do without him? You'd wipe your mouth and excuse yourself from the table, and not two minutes later, Diana'd be right behind you. Better out than in there with him, the promise-breakin' son of a bitch._

He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. He was not his father's son, not with Rebecca. He made it a point to tell her he loved her every morning and every night, even when he couldn't be with her. When they argued, he did his best to use his logic, not his voice, as the weapon against her, and when he slipped, it was frustration, not malice, that spurred his tongue. He had never called her a bitch, slut or whore, even when whispering dirty nothings into her ear on hot summer nights, and he had never regretted her, never cursed her infirmity as a shame to be heaped upon her head. She was sacred and sacrosanct to him, and he had done the best he could.

_You did everything but listen. When her disability got in the way of your job, you used love as a weapon to bend her to your will and raised the specter that every officer's wife fears-the honor guard and the twenty-one gun salute to the solemn strains of _Amazing Grace_ and the white rose folded into a flag. You accused her of selfishness and pig-headedness, and then you dumped her off at that hellhole so you could rejoin the chase. You never stopped to consider what you were costin' her._

_She didn't want to leave the job. You made her. You cajoled and wheedled and brought out the trump cards of your peace of mind and the baby's health, and she was in a no-win situation. If she protested, she didn't care about you or the baby. What else could she do but acquiesce? She officially went on a six-month sabbatical at seven months; she came home that afternoon and cried like her heart was broken, and like an idiot, you assumed it was because she thought she wasn't holdin' up her end of the bargain. You told her not to worry, that it was a paid sabbatical, and besides, you'd be there to take care of her. And you were. For four weeks. And then you shipped her to Trinity and went back to playin' cops and robbers._

He realized as he stared at her wall of accolades that it wasn't about the money and never had been. It was about the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of a job well done. She lived for the numbers and the promise of new truths, pursued them with the same zeal with which he chased scumbags through the streets, and the wall was an unimpeachable testimonial to her skill. She had carved a niche for herself between these four walls, an identity independent of the ring on her finger, and he had blithely snatched it away.

He felt sick. "I just wanted to take care of her, make sure she was safe," he told the empty room. It was imploring. The room was unmoved, and he tottered to the chair in front of her desk, sank into it, and buried his head in his hands.

_Maybe she got tired of bein' smothered and ran as far and fast as she could, beyond the wall in Grand Central Station. You know the one; she took you there in June, held your hand and pulled through the grimy brick into another world. It was hansom cabs and gaslights and cobble-stoned streets. It was Old Gotham, and you thought it had been obliterated by the Industrial Revolution, but there it was, miraculously untouched by time. She pulled you past people dressed in flowing robes and top hats and wool vests, past apothecaries and midwiferies and book-binders. _

_She took you to the police precinct, which, on the outside, looked a lot like yours, but on the inside, it was another world. There were no computers or telephones, no photocopiers with stacks of paper. There was the musty smell of parchment and the industrious scratch of quills. Officers in blue robes carried handbills and wooden truncheons in the leather belts of their uniforms. The clerk at the reception desk looked up Rebecca's name in an enormous, ornate, leather-bound ledger, and when he found it, he pointed the way to the appropriate office with ink-stained fingers._

_It was an alien world to you, but Rebecca was unfazed. She darted through the streets with enthusiasm and stopped to gaze into the shop windows. It was a homecoming for her, and in her own way she danced in the streets. She laughed and exclaimed and pointed out an oddity she had forgotten and rediscovered, but when she saw you hanging diffidently back, she returned to your side and dampered her childlike wonder._

_She saw nothing at all amiss about Auror Ramirez' uniform or his archaic office with quills and parchment strewn over the desktop instead of pens and legal pads. In fact, she was wistful as she took in the untidy clutter. They shook hands and began to talk, and within three sentences, you were quietly excluded from the conversation, which turned on Muggle statutes and Wizarding secrecy laws._

_She asked you what you thought later, after her killin' of Draco Malfoy had been ruled an act of self-defense by a tribunal of three men in black robes and powdered wigs. She was rollin' down the narrow sidewalk, one hand twined in yours and the other holdin' a strawberry ice cream cone whose scoops leaned precariously, but never fell, no matter how hard she bounced over the uneven pavement. What could you say to that when you were watchin' her chair roll of its own volition?_

_You tried to imagine your son growin' up there and couldn't. Where were the toys and TVs? Where were the subways, the rattlin' cars that made you feel weightless as you hurtled along with your hand curled around the metal pole for balance? Where were the ballgames? You'd seen kids runnin' down the street, but none of 'em carried bats or gloves. They all had brooms, and you wondered why they were all playin' chimney sweep. Where were the doctors if he got sick?_

_It was sticky there, and humid, and everywhere you went was like livin' under power lines, a constant, uncomfortable thrum in your bones. You couldn't imagine rockin' a baby to sleep there, or Rebecca nursin' him or singin' him to sleep, and you didn't want to. You wanted to help raise your boy, be involved in bringin' him up, and if you lived there, they'd never let you. They'd always look at you askance because you weren't one of them._

_You wanted to sing him lullabies that your ma had sung to you, hear his first word with a New York brogue, watch him take his first wobblin' steps on the grass in Central Park, carry him into Yankee Stadium on your shoulders. You wanted to buy him dogs with spicy mustard and teach him about baseball and football and hockey. You didn't want him to be just like you, but you wanted him to know where he came from and to love New York as much as you did._

_But you didn't want to make Rebecca feel like a freak for finally showin' you the world she came from, for lettin' you see the secret she'd been hidin' for so long. She was lookin' at you with a runner of melted ice cream on her chin, and her eyes were dancin' like she'd given you the world's greatest gift. So you reached down with the ball of your thumb, wiped the ice cream from her chin, and told her it would take some getting used to, which was as much of the truth as you could stand to tell._

_She must have known the rest of it, though, because she was gentle with you that night and for many nights thereafter, and one night while she was rubbin' your back, she promised that she wouldn't take Junior into the magical world until you were comfortable with it, or until he turned out to be magical. If he wasn't, there was no need for him to know about it at all. It meant that she wouldn't be able to do magic, but it also guaranteed that you wouldn't be shut outta his life. A weight lifted from your chest, and you kissed her and her belly until she fell asleep._

_Maybe since you broke your promise to look after her while she was pregnant, she broke hers and fled to the place where she is on equal footin' with everyone else. She doesn't have to worry about sidewalks or curbs or narrow doorways because with a flick of her wrist, she could float over 'em or make 'em disappear. It'd be easier to raise a baby there, and she could go back to work instead of lyin' in bed like some brood mare._

Go where the magic is. _That's what the janitor said. _They're attracted to it even if they don't know it.

"No," he muttered thickly, and sat forward in his chair, sure he was about to vomit. "No, no, no. Rebecca wouldn't."

_Are you sure?_

If she had gone beyond the wall, he would never catch her. He couldn't pass through it without her, and there was an Auror dressed as Muggle footpatrol guarding the entrance just in case.

He heard the door open. When he looked up, a woman with silver hair in a loose chignon was staring disapprovingly at him over the thick, metal rims of her horn-rimmed glasses.

"May I help you?" she asked coolly.

He automatically reached for his badge. "I'm Detective Flack," he said.

The woman's face cleared. "Oh. You must be Rebecca's husband," she said warmly, and slipped into the room, hand extended. "I'm Abigail Krantz, Head of the Mathematics Department. I can't tell you how pleased I am to finally meet you. Rebecca's always spoken so highly of you."

He accepted the proffered hand without realizing it. "She has, huh?" He felt slow and stupid.

"And I can see why," Krantz went on. "Such a handsome young man. Rebecca has been a crown jewel for this department, she really has. I suppose we've got you to thank for it."

"Thank?" he said blankly. He wanted her to go away so that he could come up with a way to find his Rebecca.

"Of course," Krantz burbled. "Without you, she might have accepted one of those innumerable job offers. Some of them, I'm surprised she didn't, noble reason or not. Harvard is a prestigious post, and they were offering more than NYU could afford to pay, as well as accessible housing. I thought for sure she'd take it, but she wouldn't hear it. Sent a polite refusal the very next day."

He stared at her. "I don't know what you're talkin' about."

Krantz' brow furrowed. "She never told you?" She shrugged. "Maybe she thought it best not to worry you. In any case, your wife has received job offers from every university on the East coast and a few in the West. She was even offered the chair of the Mathematics Department at UC-Boulder. Quite a coup for someone her age. Turned it down flat. Said she wasn't uprooting her New York husband so that he could shovel buffalo turds in Colorado." Pained, as though such mild profanity distressed her. "Your wife has quite a way with words, Detective."

He nodded mutely. He hadn't the breath for words,

Krantz peered at him over the rims of her glasses. "Are you all right? You looked peaked."

"Rebecca went missing from the hospital this morning. I thought she might'a come here," he said dully.

"Missing?" Krantz repeated shrilly. Her hand rose to her throat. "Dear God. I hope she's all right. If she's come here, I haven't seen her. Oh, bless you, but you look faint. Let me get you a glass of water." She patted his shoulder and bustled from the room.

He was grateful for the silence. He sat with his hands between his knees and stared at the wilting sunflower on the windowsill. It was a nodding giant, hulking over the small terra cotta pot in which it lived. It was obvious that before Rebecca left, she had tended it well, but now the thick, yellow leaves were brown and curling, and the venerable black head drooped on its stalk.

_Is that what I've been doin' to her? _he thought. _Has she been wiltin' in my shadow all these years?_

Krantz returned with a plastic cup of water and handed it to him. "There you are, Detective. I wish I could be of more help, but the last time I saw Rebecca, she was asking me for a sabbatical so she could have her baby. I gave it to her, naturally. Hasn't missed a day in five years."

Krantz hovered at his shoulder and wrung her hands solicitously. Her eyes were wide and sympathetic behind the lenses of her glasses, and she reminded him of an inquisitive ostrich. He slipped the rim of the cup between his lips to smother a bark of helpless, inappropriate laughter.

"I'd love to stay and help, Detective," Krantz said ruefully. "But unfortunately, I've got a meeting of Department Chairs to attend. Will you be all right?"

"Yeah, I'm good," he muttered vaguely. "Thanks."

Krantz sniffed as if to say she was dubious of any such claims, but she nodded briskly and said, "If you need me, my receptionist will be happy to page me immediately. Are you sure-?

"I'm sure."

"In that case, I'll be going." She started for the door. "Detective?"

"Ma'am?"

"I hope you find her."

He nodded. "Thank you."

When she was gone and the door had closed behind her, he rose and went to the windowsill, carrying the untouched cup of water. He poured it into the sunflower's pot with an unsteady hand and reached out to smooth the dry, furled petals. If he couldn't take care of her, then he would take care of it. It was a stupid, useless gesture on a plant already dying, but he was damned if another of her ambitions was going to die because of him.

"Bottoms up, pal," he told the plant.

His cellphone rang as he was poking the water more deeply into the soil, and he fumbled in his shirt pocket. If it was Stabler again, he was going to lose his fucking mind. He and Tutuola had been calling incessantly, and he'd hung up without taking the calls. He no longer gave a shit about who was raping women and chopping them up with a bucksaw. All he cared about was his girl and the tiny heartbeat she carried.

He checked the caller ID. _Unknown._ He flipped open the phone. "Flack."

A burst of static. A breath. Then a voice. "Sweetheart, I need you."

He left the office at a dead run, potting soil caked on his fingers.


	5. Midnight Tea

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:Nyverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

She was lying in the bed, damp hair fanned over the pillows. There were two I.V. lines in the top of her right hand; one carried fluids to treat dehydration, and the other was a low-dose antibiotic to prevent possible infection in the pressure sores on her leg and shoulder. There was a nasal canula in her nose to feed her oxygen. Strictly a precaution, Dr. Fiorello had said, but better to be safe than sorry. There was a fetal monitor attached to her belly, and it counted the beats of his son's heart and scrawled them onto the screen with a vivid green finger. He reached out and placed his palm on the firm dome of her stomach, and from inside came the insistent squirm and rap of a tiny hand or foot. _Still here, Pop. _Almost jaunty, and he laughed even as he blinked to clear his blurred vision.

"You better be, Junior," he whispered.

His mother was pale as milk against the pretty, yellow bed linens, the contrast made all the sharper by the damp gold of her hair. Dr. Fiorello and the attending physician both assured him that she was fine, was in remarkably good condition for a woman who had been wandering through the streets with no water and enough Halidol in her system to render her unconscious, but she didn't look fine. She looked wasted and withered. Her lips were cracked and parched, and her eyes, when they were open, were raw and bloodshot.

_She looks just like the sunflower in her office, _he thought, and scrubbed his face with his hands. _Wilted and dried-out and boneless._

_She felt like it, too, when you scooped her up. She was brittle and gritty and too light, sticky with unwashed skin. It was like touching a bundle of sun-baked corn husks, and she offered no resistance when you moved her arms and legs to see the kind of shape she was in. She could only blink at you and cry, and she was too exhausted to even do that. All she could manage was a sluggish, defeated lowing from the back of her scoured throat. You kept tryin' to get her to sit up and look at you, but it took more energy than she had, and her head lolled on the stem of her neck while she tried to focus glazed eyes._

Baby? I've been looking for you, _she managed weakly, and then she was sinkin' into your arms again, logy and feverish and pantin' like barest lucidity was too much effort._

_The plaintive bewilderment in her voice twisted in your gut like a dull blade, and you almost lost it in the middle of Grand Central, but you sucked it up and got her into the bathroom, where you could wet her down and look her over and let her pee. She was inert as you lifted her onto the toilet, and the smell broke your heart. It was unwashed body and apple cores left to ferment and rot in the sun, and molderin' newspapers. It was the jungly, pungent reek of winos and dyin' junkies sweatin' their disease into the precinct holdin' cells in the summer. You'd smelled it almost every day as a beat cop, but to smell it on your girl was more than you could stand._

_You rubbed her down with wet paper towels and made her talk to you even though her normally articulate mouth was clumsy and stupid. You asked her name and what the square root of 144 was and 2 plus 2 to the 10th power. You checked her pulse and her pupils and searched for your son beneath your hands. She slumped on the seat and slurred, but the answers were right when she gave them, and that kept panic at bay. She was still there beneath the layers of drugs, exhaustion, and confusion._

_You gave her sips of water from your cupped palm and washed her face and kissed her. She tasted bitter, tarnished pennies, but if you ever needed proof that her love for you was gut instinct, that was it, because the mouth that couldn't form syllables returned the kiss. It was sloppy and uncoordinated, but unmistakable in its intent. She groped for your nape and slalomed precariously on the toilet and told you she was glad you were here because she was so goddamned _tired, _and could she sleep now?_

_You pulled off her hospital shift and inspected her for injuries, and the pressure sores made your stomach turn, but it was the bruising on her arms that churned nausea in the pit of your stomach. Not the needle marks, though the coloring indicated excessive force; it was the fingerprints that did it. They were deep, dark blooms pressed into the flesh of her wrist. It wasn't until later, when Stella was photographin' her injuries as evidence for criminal negligence, that you noticed identical marks on her ankles. You'd seen marks like that before, and so had Stella, in the photos of rape victims taken in the ER._

_To be fair, you'd left a circlet of your fingers on her wrists a time or two, but that was a harmless consequence of enthusiastic lovemakin', and Rebecca carried 'em like badges of honor, preened over 'em afterwards while you were lyin' beside her with an arm draped over her sweaty belly and a hand idly cuppin' her breast. She called 'em tiger claws, and she laughed when she said it, as if it was a delicious an' unutterable secret. Sometimes that laugh, throaty and raspy with the echo of her comin' her brains out underneath your surgin' hips, was enough to entice you to a second round, but most'a the time, you just traded salty kisses and made bad tiger puns until you feel asleep or one of you got up to pee. Those marks were love marks, a tacit acknowledgement of trust and mutual submission._

_But the marks on her wrists and ankles now were different. They were harsh and ugly in the bright, analytical light of the hospital exam room, and the distortion of the bruising told you that she had put up a fight. She had never struggled with you even in play; the only movement had been the inexorable tightening of her muscles as they ratcheted towards an inevitable tipping-point into the abyss. Those imprints spoke a truth, but so did these. One was beautiful, and one was ugly, but both were unassailable, and these told you that someone had held her down and forcibly injected something into her body while she fought the intrusion. What was that if not the simplest definition of violation? You wondered if she had called for you when they were holding her down and exposing her vein to the needle. Then you were out of your chair and making a lurching beeline for the nearest bathroom to heave your guts._

_But Stella and the revelation of the ankle bruises were ninety minutes in the future then. In that moment, it was just you and her and a bathroom stall. You drew your fingers over the bruising and asked forgiveness you could never possibly earn. You had no right to ask her to go to another hospital after what she'd endured, not with the proof of it still branded on her skin in red welts and in the grimy nape of her neck, but you did anyway. You were terrified for her and the baby, and it was well beyond the power to fix all by yourself. You couldn't squat in front of that squalid public toilet and watch your light go out, but you weren't going to force her hand, either. You'd tried that already and look where it'd landed you. So you asked._

_She resisted. Of course she fuckin' did. Who in their right mind wouldn't? But you were desperate, and she was tired, and so you begged her for a compromise. You asked her to let Dr. Fiorello decide. After all, he'd never hurt her or let her be hurt, and he'd never lied to her, and there was Junior to think about. The mention of your pet name for the baby momentarily roused her, and she straightened with a grunt. The baby was a concrete reality she could touch and feel, and it cut through the foggy immediacy of her own fear._

All right, _she agreed, and rested her head against the filthy stall wall._

_You made the call right there in the bathroom, afraid she'd change her mind if you let her think too long. You listened to the rings and prayed he'd be in and held her hand as much to keep yourself together as keep her calm, and then the receptionist's voice was in your ear, asking how she could help you today. Two minutes later, Dr. Fiorello was on the line, and thirty seconds after that, he was on his way to Grand Central._

_You got her out to the payphones again, and ten minutes later, the doctor was threading his way through the crowd, black bag clutched in one leathery hand. He knelt in front of her without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, and he talked to your girl with his soothing, rustic voice, called her his bella dama. He checked her vitals with a stethoscope from his bag and murmured in his esoteric language._

_The verdict was a foregone conclusion, but comin' from him, it wasn't so damnin'. She pleaded not to be returned to Trinity, and on that you all agreed. St. Vincent's or New York Presbyterian, he suggested, and he laid out the pros and cons of both while you called for the bus. _

_He was the one who started the I.V.s once she was in the ambulance, and he was the one who administered the emetic that made her vomit ceaselessly for the duration of the ride. She clutched your knees and vomited into the flimsy sick bowl you held and cried for you to make it stop, but all you could do was hold her hair and tell her to hold on doll, just hold on. The paramedics tried not to look at her out of respect, and you wanted to punch 'em in the face so they'd look at you with somethin' other than pity._

_Then it was here to St. Vincent's, and more pukin' and washin' and dressin' of wounds. You filled out the admission forms with a sense of déjà vu, and you couldn't shake the feelin' that you were sellin' her down the river. The nurses were gonna scrub her hair, but you told 'em that you'd do it, and you did, leaned her head over a metal basin and washed her hair like you did at home when you wanted to love her without necessarily takin' her to bed. Your heart ached at the grit beneath your massagin' fingers and the grey suds that swirled and gurgled down the drain, but she purred beneath your hands, and when she caught your gaze, she was all there again. Tired and weak and full'a fresh holes from new blood draws, but there, and your knees went weak with relief. Thirty minutes later, she was propped in this bed and eatin' weak broth and soda crackers, and you've been here ever since, holdin' her hand and watchin' over her._

Nor was he the only one. Stella still called to check in every hour or so. She had gone back to the lab with her collected evidence just after eight o'clock, mouth set in a thin, grim line, and he suspected that the idiot nurse who had been stupid enough to fuck with one of hers was in for the ride of her miserable life. As tired as he was, it made him smile.

Mac had called, too, and Hawkes had put in an appearance at nine-thirty, poking his head in the doorway and studying Rebecca with grave intensity while she slept. He had reminded him of a befuddled meerkat, wide-eyed and discreetly avid, and it had been a measure of how tired he was that he had almost told him so. He had withdrawn shortly thereafter, and Flack suspected that he was still drifting through the halls in the wake of Rebecca's doctors, the Ghost of Physicians Past.

And Gavin, of course.

_There was a blast from the past you never expected. You were so fixated on Rebecca that you didn't even realize he was there until they were loadin' her into the ambulance. He ambled over then, wipin' his hands on his jeans. You were so surprised to see him that you did a double-take._

Gav? _Incredulous and dazed, as though you were lookin' at a mirage._

_He gave a diffident, splay-fingered wave. _Heya, kid.

What're you doin' here?

She called me; said she needed help. She sounded pretty bad, so I figured I better, you know. _He shrugged and scuffed the worn toe of his sneaker on the dirty terrazzo floor._

_It cut you to the quick that your girl had turned to someone else before you, and you wanted to ask him why and what she had said to him, but the paramedics were clamberin' into the back of the bus and tellin' you that if you wanted to ride with her, you had to come now. So you climbed into the ambulance without a backward glance, and when you looked out the smudged, porthole window, he was still standin' there, lost and tryin' to find himself in the scuff marks of his sneakers._

_You didn't think you'd see him again, but he turned up here about an hour after the ambulance brought you in, lingerin' in the far corners while doctors attached fetal monitors and ordered blood draws and urinalysis. He walked a nervous, slouching circuit outside the exam room and stopped every now and then to pick up a magazine from the tables stationed at haphazard intervals along the hallway, bend it, and drop it again. He never spoke or tried to attract your attention. He just walked his endless, loopin' walk._

Like an officer holdin' vigil, _you thought, and pushed it aside because according to the State of New York, Gavin Moran lost the right to call himself an officer of the law when he altered a shop owner's dyin' declaration and tampered with a crime scene to protect his son. But your mind was not part and parcel of the State of New York, and you knew that once a cop, always a cop. It's in your blood like DNA, and strippin' a cop of his uniform doesn't change that. Three and a half-years outta the force, and he still walked and thought like a cop._

_You finally got a chance to talk to him when they were rollin' Rebecca to her room. You asked him what he was doin' there, and he shrugged and sidled from foot to foot and muttered gruffly, _I dunno, kid. Just wanted to check on things, I guess. Make sure you were okay an' all.

What do you care? _you thought childishly. _The last time I talked to you, you told me to go fuck myself. _You ran your fingers through your hair and sighed. _I appreciate that, Gav, but right now, I don't fuckin' know anything. _It was almost a shout, frustration and spent adrenaline and simple, primal fear._

_Gavin nodded. _Yeah, okay, kid, okay. I shouldn't'a bothered ya. It's just-, _He gave a lopsided, one-shouldered shrug and a bleak, tight-lipped smile that was millimeters from a rictus. He gave a choppy, half-salute and turned away._

Gav, wait, _you called, and he paused. _Look, I didn-I just-I have-thank you. For lookin' out for her.

Sure, kid. Hey, listen. I don't wanna stick my nose where it doesn't belong, but you got everything you need? I'm not sure how long she's goin' to be here or if you packed a bag for her. I know when Andrea was havin' the girls, she got this bag ready about a month in advance so we wouldn't be runnin' around in the dark like chickens with our heads cut off when it finally happened. She was always good like that, you know? Not that it mattered. Her water broke while she was on the john and I was in the fuckin' shower. I got out with shampoo in my goddamned eyes, missed the bathmat, skidded on the tile, and almost busted my balls. Drove to the hospital with a fuckin' head full of Pert or some shit and looked like a retarded asswipe, runnin' down the hallway with bubbles floatin' outta my damn scalp. Anyway, kid, what I'm getting at is, do you need me to run by your place to pick up some clothes, maybe somethin' to read?

_You were still his rookie eight years after you'd left the beat and his precinct behind, and he was still lookin' out for you, findin' the small details you overlooked in your haste to tackle the biggest problem first. More than once your rookie year, he kept you from getting your ass blown off 'cause you'd leaped without lookin', and he taught you how to keep your eyes open for evidence lazier and stupider cops might miss. You got your shield by standin' on his shoulders, and even after you were gone, he was there with advice and a slap on the back. Or upside the head if you needed. You're gonna be his rookie 'til he's under the sod at Forest Lawn._

_You opened your mouth, closed it again, then said, _Thanks for the image of your soapy balls, Gav.

_The next minute, you were snortin' and laughin' and remindin' yourself that your wife was being settled into a room down the hall. Gavin was runnin' his fingers through his hair and gruntin, hand pressed to the wall to hold himself up._

Shit, _you managed when you'd gotten yourself under control, and wiped your streamin' eyes with the back of your hand. _She had a bag, but Stel took it into evidence. _The last of your mirth faded with the connection of the word _evidence _to your wife. _I guess I should go get some stuff.

_Gavin shook his head. _You don't need to go nowhere. Lemme get it. _He held out his hand._

_You fumbled in the pocket of your pants for your keys. _You sure it isn't too much trouble?

If it was too much trouble, I wouldn't'a volunteered, _he said mildly, and thrust out his hand again._

_You dropped the keys into his upturned palm. _Thanks. You know where I live, right?

_ I He raised an eyebrow at that. _You moved since I saw you last?

Naw.

Then, yeah, I know where you live. I ain't turned in my brain, kid. Now, g'on. Look after your girl. I'll be back as soon as I finish my impromptu panty raid. _He cuffed the back of your neck and shook you, and then he turned and ambled away, whistlin' "Danny Boy." You paced the hallway to pull yourself together because you didn't want Rebecca to see you actin' like a snivelin' pussy, and then you went to her. You've been sittin' here ever since, holdin' her hand and fussin' over her blankets and watchin' your baby's heartbeat and thinkin'._

About Gavin, of course. And Hector. When Mac had come to him with the incontrovertible proof that Gavin had pissed on his badge in the name of a bastard son who hated his guts, he had been bewildered and furious and hurt that Gavin would throw away everything he'd busted his ass for on behalf of an ungrateful little shit who'd blown out a shop owner's brains just to prove he had no pig-stink on his skin. The question had haunted him, and the day he'd walked Gavin out of his precinct under the pretense of a smoke, he'd gone to Sullivan's and drunk until the question's sharp, tearing edges had blunted into irrelevance.

It wasn't until he'd seen the first sonogram of his own child that the penny had dropped. The image on the screen had been no bigger than a castor bean, but the emotion it inspired had been monolithic and savagely primitive. _Mine. _The life inside her had been his, and it didn't matter that it was nothing but a clump of tissue and inexorably dividing cells; blood called to its own. It was his child, and for the rest of his life, he would feel the persistent, irresistible tug of it behind his breastbone.

The feeling had only intensified as her belly grew and the pictures defined the future more firmly. When Dr. Fiorello had circled his son's sex in red Sharpie, the world had taken a vertiginous tilt, and the feeling had magnified a thousand-fold. _He is mine. My son. My boy. My Junior._ All else faded into insignificance before it, and he could only imagine its power the first time his son reached for him or called him "Daddy" in that quavering, little voice.

He no longer wondered why Gavin had chosen the road he did; he only wondered now if it had taken him two seconds or three to make the decision.

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft tap on the door, and Dr. Fiorello entered, chart in one hand.

"Dr. Fiorello. I thought you went home hours ago." He made to rise from his chair, but the doctor flapped a dissuading hand at him and closed the door.

"Don't get up, Detective," he said wearily. He grabbed a nearby chair, dragged it beside Flack's and sat down with the creak of joints and grinding bones. "God, what a day." He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and yawned. "How are you doing, Detective?"

Flack shrugged. "Does it matter? What about her?" He nodded toward Rebecca. "What about my girl? My Junior?"

Dr. Fiorello flipped open the medical chart and thumbed through the pages. "She is strong, your bella dama, stronger than most people give her credit for, I think."

"What happened to her while I wasn't lookin'?" he asked quietly.

Dr. Fiorello studied him in silence, and even in the dim glow of the cardiac and fetal monitors, Flack could see the old doctor dredging his store of years and experience for words of comfort, some platitude to soothe the sting of well-placed blame.

Finally, he sighed and looked at the chart again. "Judging from the level of dehydration she suffered, I'd guess that she's been limited to sixteen ounces of water or less for the past four days. If this were the winter, it wouldn't matter as much, but with the heat and her already-compromised ability to sweat as much as she needs to, it was a nasty turn. No permanent damage to her kidneys, thank the saints, but given a few more days, she could have suffered total renal failure."

"Meaning if she hadn't run, she would have died." He was numb.

"Possibly," he agreed. "Lord knows what they would have told you, considering that she'd had a glorious pregnancy until she crossed the threshold of that-," His lip curled in disdain. "-place. And they would have been hard-pressed to explain the criminally-negligent levels of Haldol in her system." He scanned the chart again. "I've seen patients at Bellevue with less. Honestly, I'm surprised she was conscious when you found her, much less mobile."

"What's that mean for the baby?" His mouth was dry.

"He's fine," Dr. Fiorello assured him. "The nurse responsible was a…well, she wasn't a total fool. The sedative she used can't be absorbed through the placenta, which means your son was unaffected."

Flack's shoulders slumped in relief, and he reached out to stroke Rebecca's belly. Mother and child stirred in unison, and Rebecca's hand met his for a brief moment.

"'S okay, babe," she murmured. "He's good." Then she stilled again.

"The antibiotics are unnecessary in all likelihood since her sores hadn't ruptured. If her blood test comes back clear in the morning, we'll discontinue them. One less needle in her arm."

"She'll like that."

"I'd like for her to stay here until she comes to term."

"Here" was the St. Vincent's maternity pavilion, and the practical corner of his soul that concerned itself with such details wept at the prospect of a future wrangle with his insurance company. The room was large and airy and blessedly private, dressed as a bedroom rather than a hospital room. There were night tables on either side of the adjustable double bed, and though it could accommodate bedrails, they were currently stowed in a cupboard beside the dresser. The nurses assured him that he could sleep in the bed with her if he wanted, and after two weeks of separate beds, he was looking forward to the cold, bony pike of her knees in his spleen.

The bathroom was spacious, with grab bars and a bathtub large enough for her to give birth in. Until Dr. Fiorello brought it up, that possibility had never entered his mind, and the thought of his son coming into the world with a mouthful of Mr. Bubble was boggling and terrifying. He had expected bored nurses barking, "Push! 1, 2, 3," at his red-faced wife, and stirrups and doctors hunkered between her spread legs like Johnny Bench. That was the way it was done, at least according to his mother.

"That she won't like," he told Dr. Fiorello. "Neither will my insurance."

"If they protest, I'll be happy to write a letter detailing why it was necessary," came the reply. "I'll be sending a copy of your wife's blood tests and toxicology reports to your lab friends once she signs the release. In the meantime, I suggest you get some sleep if you can. She'll need you over the next few days." He patted him on the shoulder and made to rise.

"Hey, doc, can I ask you somethin'?" Quiet, diffident.

Fiorello paused, arms pressed to the arms of his chair and rump hovering indecisively above the seat. "Certainly."

"Why you doin' alla this for her? For us?"

Fiorello settled into the chair again, and Flack noted that he seemed unsurprised by the question. "The simplest answer is, I'm a doctor. It's my job to care." He studied Rebecca as she slept, and a faint, fond smile flitted in the corners of his mouth.

"But?" Flack prompted.

"I don't see many people like her in my practice. Other doctors see them all the time, mending warped bones and coaxing unruly neurological and muscular systems into grudging, imperfect obedience. Your bella dama has seen them a time or two." He gestured vaguely to her besheeted legs, where the pale skin was marred by a latticework of scars.

"Thirty-six." Flack said, and for the first time, it struck him how large that number was.

"Mmm. Thirty-six pounds of unwilling flesh. No wonder your love is such a small girl. But as I told you, I do not see them as often. What they have can be taken, but they cannot give willingly in turn. Love and babies are not for them, the world says, and too many of them hear and believe. I've had three disabled women before Rebecca in my care in twenty-five years. Far too few. But given what happened to them, I'm not surprised."

Flack's stomach plummeted into his shoes, and his fingers curled tightly around the arms of his chair. "What do you mean?" he demanded warily.

"One had an abortion. Another had the child taken by CPS in the name of its welfare. There was nothing wrong with either of them except for her paralyzed legs. The last delivered a healthy girl, raised her for three years and lost custody in a bitter divorce. The husband claimed her disability made her an unfit parent, despite the fact that she had been raising the child by herself for most of the three years while her husband jetted around the world on business. The judge believed his eyes and his prejudices and awarded sole custody to the father. Last I heard, the girl was at a boarding school in Sweden, the mother was in a home for the elderly and disabled, and the father was still womanizing his way around the world."

Flack shook his head in disgust. "That guy was a fuckin' prick."

"Yes," Dr. Fiorello agreed. "He was."

"I don't get it," Flack went on. "How can people decide that just 'cause God made a mistake on the assembly line, that means they don't deserve to have a life?"

"Who says He made a mistake?" the doctor countered mildly. "Do you consider her a mistake?"

He blinked, startled. "No. I don't."

_She's a fuckin' gift that fell into my lap on 34th, and every day since I found her, I've been waitin' for the dream to end, for her to wake up, rub the sleep an' fairy dust outta her eyes and wonder what the hell she's doin' with a thick bastard like me._

"What's that got to do-,"

"Audacity is admired only in those from whom it is expected. In everyone else, it is called hubris and crushed with a ruthless fist. She knew this-knows it-and she chose to have your baby anyway. She chose to love you anyway. That takes balls, Detective. She's going to have a hard road ahead of her, harder if you die, and I want to make it as easy for her as I can. For as many babies as I can."

"Aw, I'm not sure there's gonna be more than one, doc. Not sure she could handle this again."

Dr. Fiorello lifted a shank from the seat cushion, rummaged in the rear pocket of his pants, and pulled out a battered, leather wallet. He opened it and pointed to a dog-eared, black-and-white photograph of a woman in a wheelchair, surrounded by five children and cradling an infant in her arms.

"This woman's husband thought the same thing. She had six."

"Yeah? Who's this?"

"My mother." He closed the wallet. "She'll have as many babies as God wills, Detective. Neither more nor fewer, and to think otherwise _is _hubris." He slipped his wallet into his pocket, rose, and stretched. "Get some sleep. You can't run on adrenaline and coffee forever."

Dr. Fiorello departed with a shuffle and a click of closing door, and he sat looking at the indistinct hump of her stomach in the darkness. He had been so sure that this would be his only child, that this was a feat she could achieve only once. Oh, he'd entertained the thought of siblings and a house full of kids and dogs, but it had been a wistful fantasy to pass the time during lulls in the bedlam at the precinct.

"Six is too many," he mumbled sleepily. "Don't think _I _could do six. Four, maybe. Four is good. A nice, round number."

He kicked off his shoes, took off his gunbelt, unloaded the clip, and put them both in the night-table drawer. He trudged over to his side of the bed.

"Rebecca, I'm comin' to bed. It's just me makin' some room, ya bed hog."

He gently maneuvered her onto her side and rolled her hip to give her stability. She grunted and batted at his hand. "Wha?" She opened her eyes and peered blearily at him. "Oh. Hey, baby." She scooted ponderously to the left to let him climb in behind her. "You smell good," she mumbled when he'd burrowed behind her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

"You're still high," he whispered into her hair. "Go back to sleep."

"Okay. I love you." The words came so easily to her, even in the heavy fogbank of mostly asleep.

"I love you, too."

She returned to her dreams pillowed on his arm, and he didn't mind a bit as the sensation bled from his fingers and wrist. It reconfirmed her solidity and ultimate reality and meant he had a second chance to not fuck it up this time. He intended to make the most of it.

He watched the bright green finger of the fetal monitor and waited for his dreams to find him.


	6. Snow White's Apple

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

She didn't expect to see him the next morning. She thought that when she awoke, it would be to an empty bed, the lingering dampness of a kiss on her cheek, and a note on the bedside table. But when she opened her eyes, it was to the sight of him bustling through the door with bags in his arms.

"Oh, hey," he said when he saw her watching him. "Didn't mean to wake you. Just thought I'd get some stuff you might need while you're here." He held up the bags. "Oh, and some deodorant and shaving cream and soap for me." He walked to the bed and bent to kiss her.

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and winced as something sharp scraped her eyelids. She blinked and peered at her hand. An I.V. needle sat in the midst of a dark bruise, held there by medical tape. "Shit," she murmured.

"Yeah. They had to give you emergency fluids and antibiotics last night. You were pretty out of it, but Dr. Fiorello says you and Junior are gonna be okay. D'you remember anything about yesterday?" He sat down on the bed and arrayed the bags at the foot.

She thought. "I remember Gavin. And Stella taking pictures. And seeing you in Grand Central and wanting to cry because you _had _found me. There was puking. And that bitch," she said bitterly.

His eyes brightened, and he leaned forward to cup her face. "You remember that?" he asked urgently. "You remember what happened at Trinity and who did it?"

She nodded. "Of course I remember, babe. You never forget the face of the enemy."

_Or the taste. Or the smell. Or their outline in the dark. When Voldemort's war ground to a war of attrition on the Hogwarts grounds and you were lying for days on end in blood and piss and thick, squelching mud, you learned to identify your own quickly. A mistake could be fatal._

_For Seamus Finnegan, it was his broad shoulders. For Snape, it was the regal, predatory swirl of his robes. It would have been the sallow hook of his nose, but that was covered by his Death Eater's mask. For McGonagall, it was the strident, unapologetic point of her hat rising over the lip of the trench like a defiant middle finger. It was blown off her head and reduced to smoldering ribbons more than once, and she always magicked it together again and stuffed it onto her head with a fierce harrumph. For Moody, it was the cobalt, glowing brightness of his magical eye. For you, it was the unmistakable bulk of your hovering wheels. Flitwick could Charm them into silence, but he couldn't make them go away._

_Your enemies carried their own markings. Lucius Malfoy, with his white-blond hair and pitiless, grey eyes, and his son, Draco, eternally flanked by the twin, squat pillars of Crabbe and Goyle. At least until an Auror laid Goyle's guts open to the moon with an upward slice of his wand and left him gaping blindly at the descending darkness, a fish left to die on a waterless shore. And then alone after Crabbe's face disappeared in a flash of fire. Walden Macnair always smelled of blood and sharpened steel, and Voldemort, the great, white whale, was a Dementor enfleshed. _

_As time and the war wore ever, inexorably onward and the days faded, one into another, into insignificance, the distinctions grew sharper even as privation and exhaustion whittled them away. The sweat and blood of the enemy differed from that of your ally. It was sour, more pungent, wolfsbane and mercury. You tasted it after Snape slit Lucius Malfoy's throat and saved you from the Killing Curse. You licked it from your fingers. He had spent his life touting the purity of his blood, and you wanted to see if it was worth the price he'd paid for it. It was bitter and foul, and you spit it out into the mud with a grimace. You associated it for the rest of the war and a long time afterwards with the taste of the damned. It wasn't salty-sweet and coppery like Colin Creevey's had been when a Severing Charm had taken his arm at the elbow and the arterial spray hit you in the face. _

_It's why you sometimes bite to draw blood after you and Don fight. It's not to wound, and it's not a kink, even if the taste of him sends heat into your cunt. It's to make sure that he hasn't changed, that he still tastes like copper and fire on your tongue. If he doesn't, then you'll know what he's become, and you can bow out gracefully before he comes home with another woman on his collar._

"Are you sure?" Don was saying now. "Stella wants to come by and get your statement as soon as you feel up to it, but it doesn't have to be right now, so don't go thinkin' you need to rush into anything. Just relax."

"Statement?" she repeated warily. "What statement?"

"We wanna prosecute the nurse for criminal neglect."

"And let me guess-you're going to throw in endangerment of a disabled person, too," she muttered sullenly.

His shoulders tensed. "If we have to, yeah," he admitted.

She snorted. "Fabulous."

"Hey," he snapped. "Stop it with the self-pityin' bullshit, Rebecca, all right? It doesn't look good on you. It ain't about the wheels under your ass. It's about the fact that those thoughtless bastards hurt my _wife_ and threatened the well-bein' of my son before he even drew a breath, and I wanna see their asses swingin' in front of a judge and a goddamn medical review board. I want licenses pulled so nobody else gets hurt." His jaw twitched, and his eyes blazed inside his face.

"All right." She was stunned by his vehemence. "You're right. I just-, It's a knee-jerk reaction."

"Why is that always the first conclusion you jump to?" he asked, exasperated.

She shrugged. "Because it's what ninety-nine percent of the world thinks when they look at me."

"Yeah? Well, I'm not ninety-nine percent of the world, doll. When you gonna get that through your head? What do I have to do?"

He seized her by her scrawny shoulders and hauled her into a kiss. It was not gentle; it was hard and aching and insistent, hot breath and scraping teeth, and all she could do was grope for his neck and scrabble in the thin sheets. She opened her mouth to warn him about morning breath, but nothing came out. Instead, it was filled with his tongue. He tasted like toothpaste and stale coffee and the pulpy tang of wooden toothpick. She breathed through her nose and opened her mouth wider.

"Is that enough, or do you need more?" he demanded when he broke the kiss. "What else you need from me?" Before she could answer, he was kissing her again. He bit her lip, and when she yelped at the sting, he licked her lip and whispered, "What else, hmm? You got my ring, my name, and my son." His fingers caressed her stomach in a possessive curl. "What else is there? You want my badge?" He opened the night table drawer, reached inside, and pulled out his badge wallet. He nonchalantly tossed it atop the covers. "Go ahead. Take it. It's just fuckin' tin and brass. Tell me what it is I gotta do to make you understand that the wheels under your ass don't matter to me and never did, 'cause I'm tired of dodgin' hand grenades that I can't see."

He was staring at her intently, and the expression on his face turned her insides to water and tallow. His eyes were dark and shuttered, and she sensed that he was waiting for an answer.

She stroked his cheek and licked her lips to moisten them. They tasted of Don. "I-," She closed her mouth and opened it again. "I just-," She took a deep breath and blurted it out before fear froze her tongue. "I'm scared you're going to wake up one morning and figure out that loving me is more trouble than it's worth. That's why I thought you put me in the hospital. Because you were tired of me. I thought you were going away." She lapsed into silence, ashamed. It sounded so ridiculous now that she had spoken it aloud.

"You thought-." Anguished, breathless, as though he had been jabbed in the stomach with the butt of a gun. He let go of her shoulders and made to rise, but she lunged for him and caught his wrist.

"No, sweetie, don't. Please."

He resisted her, and she was sure that he was going to slip from her grasp, but then his arm went slack in her grip. "I put you there 'cause I was scared. You couldn't stand up by yourself, Rebecca. What else was I supposed to do? I'd leave for work, and all day long, I'd have visions of comin' home to find you bleedin' to death on the bathroom floor with our baby's dead, blue head peekin' from between your bloody legs."

She flinched and closed her eyes against the image he invoked.

_You've had visions like that a time or two, _her grandfather grumbled. _When your center of gravity shifted from your misaligned hips to the center of your expanding stomach. You'd be pivoting onto the toilet, and grab bar or not, the world would take a drunken, dizzying lurch. Your heels would leave the floor, and you'd feel the ominous shift in balance from heel toward splayed toes. You knew if it got to the toes, it would be all she wrote. The list would be uncorrectable, and you'd cushion the blow with your baby's skull. So you clung to the hand rail with feverish, white-knuckled fingers and prayed that it wouldn't reach the tipping point. You'd listen to the pounding of your heart and taste the bitter gall of adrenaline on your tongue, and the capricious point of gravity's heavy finger would spiderwalk along the tender, soft-skinned soles of your feet, dance and tease and tickle your toes. One indrawn breath might be all it took, so you held your breath until your chest ached and your lungs burned for want of oxygen. Eventually, the weight would settle, and you'd sink bonelessly onto the toilet, shivering and nauseated. You knew it was only a matter of time._

_And then one night, it did tip, and you were freefalling toward the tile. Calamity was fast approaching, but Don was faster. He caught you on the fly, frozen in a delicate fencer's crouch as he supported your forearms and heaved you upright. He was extraordinarily beautiful, your shirtless Superman, and you would have told him so, but you were too busy scrambling for your sense of equilibrium. You just panted and thought of Love by the Bathroom Light and listened to his heart pound. You thought he was going to ask you right then, but bless his heart, he loved you too much to bring the hammer down and waited until the next morning._

_You knew it was coming, and you knew it was right, but that didn't make it any easier. You fought because it was instinct to fight, and you knew what was waiting for you. Memories seventeen years buried were stirring, and you didn't want them to break the surface, grinning and leering with their half-fleshed faces and scrabbling for you with clittering, denuded fingers. Terror was stronger than reason, and why not? Reason is a fickle companion, but terror stays with you forever._

_He snared you with a cheap shot, yes, but beneath the anger and hurt was a guilty relief. The secret was out, and there was no longer anything to hide. It was out of your hands now, and the energy you'd spent pretending everything was all right could now be conserved in preparation for the baby. He was going to protect you._

_And then he left you there. Left you with the blue, plastic wristband and its freight of memories around your arm. Left you to the sting of the needle and the vicious, clutching hand of medical restraints. You woke from nightmares in a cold sweat and called the 33rd, desperate for the reassurance of his voice, but the desk sergeant on duty always told you he was out on a lead or in a task force meeting and couldn't be disturbed. You thought about calling his cellphone, but you were afraid it might ring during a foot pursuit or a gun battle and provide the half-second distraction a crack-head would need to put a bullet in his brain and leave you a widow._

_So you contented yourself with calls to the precinct, but as the days passed and calls went unreturned, the shadows of your imagination grew long and frightful. You wondered why the phone remained so stubbornly silent. You picked up the receiver to check for a dial tone and replaced it just as quickly in case he chose that moment to call. You wondered if he'd been shot and nobody wanted to tell you for fear that you'd get hysterical and go into early labor._

_Mostly you contemplated the possibility that he had cut and run, that he'd gotten tired of the extra responsibility foisted upon him by marrying you. You imagined him down at the precinct or at Sullivan's, knocking back beers and celebrating his freedom with the people he loved most. Ding dong, the witch is dead, and Don Flack, Jr. is free!_

_But the witch wasn't dead; she was in the doorway of your room, and she fed you her poison not from the ripe, enticing fruit of an apple, but the business end of a syringe. She and her harpies held you down, and you knew then that your worst surmises were true, because if Don still loved you, he would have been there protecting you. You screamed for him, and he did not come, and that was the final, terrible proof._

_Then there was a voice you remembered but could not place, and hands chivvying you out the door into dim, blossoming dawn. _Go on, now. You don't have much time. _The voice of God heard from a distant shore. So you fled, blind and without compass, into the hard wilderness of bodies and skyscrapers. There were sidewalks and bile and blurred faces, and you thought of Dali and Derrida and the truths behind the masks._

_Then there was Grand Central and the smell of bodies and of piss curdled to vinegar. And Gavin with his rough epiphany in a stinging slap. And then there was your sweet, gentle love, who cradled you in his arms, and who didn't give a good goddamn about the way you smelled. His hands and his lips and his soothing, caressing palms on your belly._

He's been with you ever since, and now he's dropped the bullshit, taken off the codpiece he wears alongside his gun, and admitted he was afraid.

Don refused to meet her gaze, and she wondered if it was anger or shame at the exposure of his vulnerability.

"Hey," she said, and squeezed his hand. "You did the right thing, you know."

He snorted. "Don't bullshit me, doll."

"I'm not."

"Oh, yeah? If I did the right thing, then how come it feels like everything has gone off the f-the rails?"

She smiled ruefully and drew her thumb over his cheek. "Because you'd take on the sins of the world if you could." When he still wouldn't look at her, she said, "The only mistake you made was forgetting that not everyone loves me as much as you do."

That got his attention. "You do know I love you, right? I know I haven't been around as much as I should, but-,"

"Sssh. You're doing fine."

"Then why'd you call Gavin before me?" he insisted stubbornly, and she could hear the hurt beneath. "You think I wouldn't come for you?"

"I needed a straight answer to a question, and love might have made a liar out of you, so I called Gavin."

"What'd you ask him?"

She shook her head. "Stupidity like that doesn't bear repeating, sweetheart. I will tell you what he said, though."

"Yeah?"

"He told me," she said, and pulled him closer until their lips brushed, "that I should pull my head out of my ass."

He sputtered laughter against her mouth, and the vibration sent a rush of lazy warmth into her fingertips and toes. "That sounds like Gav, all right," he murmured. "He brought some stuff from the house while you were sleepin' last night." He gestured to the black suitcase set beside the bed. "Some clothes and books. He didn't know what you'd like, so he just grabbed what he could."

She groaned. "Gavin Moran saw my underwear?"

"Oh." He flushed. "I don't know; I didn't ask."

"I hope he liked my skidmark collection," she muttered ruefully.

"Jesus Christ, doll." But he was laughing.

He was beautiful when he laughed. Actually, she was hard-pressed to think of a time when he _wasn't_ a study in Divine loveliness. It was in the lines of his hands and the brightness of his eyes. Sometimes when they went to a party or a precinct function, she hung on the periphery of the proceedings just so she could watch him with the clarity of distance. She'd watch him talk with his captain or a buddy on the force, and let her gaze linger on the smooth, freshly-shaven point of his jaw or the nape of his neck. Sometimes, it was his Adam's apple that held her in thrall, or the jut of his hip blunted by the thick denim of his jeans. She would watch and marvel and yes, gloat, that such a glorious work of God's hands should love her above all else. Not flattering, perhaps, but honest, and it was almost enough to make her thank a God with whom she seldom conversed.

"Speaking of stuff, what's in the bags?" She nodded in the direction of the assorted bags on the foot of the bed.

He brightened. "Like I said, it's stuff I thought you might need while you were here." He picked up the nearest bag and rummaged through the contents. "Let's see. There's a crossword book-brainbuster version. 'S what it said on the cover anyway." He tossed it onto the bed. "Oh, and some of that chamomile-scented powder for your hands. And a bottle of moisturizin' lotion for your stomach. The bottle said it helped reduce the appearance of stretch marks, too. Not that you got any of those," he added hastily. "And even if you did, I wouldn't care 'cause you're beautiful an' alla that." He stopped, flustered. "I'm just diggin' myself in deeper, huh?"

She laughed. "Yes, but you're cute, so I'll go easy on you."

He replaced the contents of the first bag and picked up another. "These are some apples and plums and peaches in here. Thought you might like 'em better than the Dole fruit cups they got in the 'cafeteria'. They got vitamins and stuff. You know, for the baby." He closed that bag and picked up a third. Nervous, fidgety.

_He was like that the night he asked you to marry him, too. He showed up at your apartment at seven o'clock sharp, dressed to the nines and absolutely gorgeous in his linen shirt. He was dancing from foot to foot on the threshold with his hands in his pockets when you opened the door. When he cupped your face to kiss you, his hands were sweating and trembling ever so slightly._

_Once inside, he couldn't sit still. He paced around the couch and the coffee table, and when you did convince him to sit, he was on his feet again five minutes later. He excused himself to the bathroom twice in an hour and kept fiddling with something in his pocket. You found out later that the object in question was an engagement ring, but at the time, you thought he had an upset stomach and was trying to gut it out because he didn't want to disappoint you after making such a fuss over this dinner for the past three weeks. You asked him if he wanted to call it off, stay in, and order Chinese, and his denial was frantic._

_He relaxed on the walk to the restaurant, but the nerves returned as soon as the maitre d' seated you and swished back to his lectern of fish-lipped judgment. He fussed purposelessly with the water glass and the linen napkin, and after the waiter departed with your orders, he resorted to spinning the ceramic napkin ring around his index finger. It was frenetic and disconcerting and so out of character for his customarily languid disposition. You considered the possibility that someone on the Vice squad had slipped him a dangerous and cruel mickey as a prank. You tracked his hands as they fluttered aimlessly around the table and you were tempted to cover them with your own to still them._

_Then he was nudging the box across the table, and the tumblers fell into place with a palpable mental click. Concerned irritation melted into breathless, heart-pounding adoration and disbelief that a man who could choose from the countless princesses in the Kingdom of New York wanted you and was afraid that you would refuse him your hand. And he was afraid. Behind that cool façade was a squirming kid waiting to be dismissed as a fool._

_He was still jittery after your acceptance, down at the pizza parlor he took you to after you left the swanky restaurant and your mostly untouched entrees behind. He talked too quickly and too loudly, and he plucked pieces of pepperoni and gobbets of cheese from his pizza and fed them to you with greasy fingers. He kissed you often, and you still remember the taste of sauce and oregano on his mouth._

_He didn't calm and accept his victory until he was entwined with you in his bed, hip to hip. He breathed in rhythm with his strokes, inhaling as he withdrew and exhaling as he surged forward again. His hands, possessed of manic energy all night, were slow and reverent as they mapped your flesh. His mouth was silent except for sighs and occasional moans as your own hands found sweat-slick skin. He was slow and deliberate and worshipful until the end, and that loss of control was simply the nature of the two-backed beast. There was serenity in his expression at last as sleep stole into the room on fat panther feet and weighted your eyes with dreaming dust._

"These are just, you know, things to make you comfortable." He held up a handled bag and set it on her lap.

She opened the bag and lifted out a pair of burgundy Isotoner slippers. They were soft and plush.

"To keep your feet warm," he explained unnecessarily.

Another reach into the bag produced a heavy, white bra whose cups had clearly been fashioned from World War II artillery shells. They were deep and bulky and unfeminine. She blinked at it, nonplussed.

"It's a nursin' bra. It helps support your boobs, and the fronts come out so you can just feed the baby without pullin' it up or down and squashin' everythin'. Helps with the leakin', too. They had some other colors, but the pink looked like a dead salmon."

"How do you know all this?"

"I asked the saleslady, and she said-,"

"You discussed breasts and bras with a saleswoman?" she interrupted incredulously.

She tried to imagine her intensely private husband discussing her breasts in public with a complete stranger. She saw him in her mind's eye, diffident and sidling beside a matronly saleswoman with plump hands and a grandmotherly smile. He was wearing his cop face, guarded and scrupulously expressionless, but embarrassment crept into his nape and marked it red, and nerves coaxed New York to the fore on his tongue.

Love made her eyes burn and her chest ache, and she held out her arms. "C'mere," she said softly.

He stretched out on his side of the bed and moved to enfold her. "If it's that ugly, we can exchange it. I got the receipt."

"Sssh." She kissed him, soft and slow and sweet, and he relaxed by degrees.

Everything she knew about a man, she had learned from him. She had learned the textures and tastes and smells of a man. The softness of lips and the hardness of a jaw. The rasp of stubble on her cheek or grazing the hypersensitive, trembling flesh of her thighs. The soft, fine hairs at nape, and the short, coarse, curling ones between his legs that often tickled her nose and made her fingertips itch and prickle. The melange of flavors in his mouth, underscored always by the minty sweetness of his toothpaste and the indefinable hint of maleness, of _him. _The sea-salt tang of sweat and tears. The earthy, primeval pungency of come on her teeth and tongue and thick in her throat.

In learning him, she had learned herself as well, discovered truths about herself and her body that she had never suspected and rediscovered truths she had forgotten. She had never realized, for instance, that her nape and the hollow of her throat were so sensitive, that a lap of tongue or the furtive brush of warm fingertips could reduce her to delirious, yearning want. Or that fingers dancing lightly over the skin on the backs of her knees could be such a delight. She had never known how starved she was for touch until it was given freely, and then she had been ravenous for it. Even holding hands was a pleasure, palm to palm as they rolled down the sidewalks.

Until Don, she had never appreciated the quantum difference between her own fingers on her cunt and someone else's. Familiarity had bred contempt for the former; after years of long acquaintance, the act of release was perfunctory and done by rote, performed with no more finesse than if they had been dialing a phone number. But Don's were stronger, broader, and more nimble, and each stroke was an epiphany. She could still remember sitting in the passenger seat of his car, gape-mouthed and helpless as his fingers worked their magic inside her underpants and she had willed her spastic legs not to snap shut around his wrist. It had been obscene, this education, _perverse_, but glorious, and she hadn't wanted it to stop. She had begged him not to as she scrabbled to grip something, anything, to keep her from slithering onto the floorboard.

He had laughed, but it wasn't cruel laughter, and he had taken great delight in watching her through dark, half-lidded eyes as she writhed and twisted and arched and tried to sort the signals sent from a nervous system unaccustomed to so much stimulus. He had written secret messages from the gods on the slick, swollen flesh of her vulva, labia, and clit, messages written in fire, and like an overwhelmed acolyte, she could only render garbled translations in the throes of glossilalia.

Then he had gently pinched and rolled her clit between thumb and forefinger and thrust another finger into her, and the pleasure had been a monstrous, rolling spasm that had robbed her of breath and left her mouthing blindly at the roof of the car.

_Like Goyle, you thought, left to gasp and carp at the sky. The French had called sex le petit morte, and in that car, you knew why._

The pleasure had crested and rolled, crested and rolled, and when she had the breath for sound, she could only keen. He had stoppered her mouth with his own to smother the incoherent wailing, and his free hand had cupped the back of her neck to hold her in the kiss. An outsider would have thought that he was giving her mouth-to-mouth, breathing life into her, but he was taking it as sacramental tribute.

He had laughed while she came and came again, and had coaxed her to ride his dexterous fingers, and she remembered thinking later that nothing could feel as good as his fingers stretching her from the inside. Sweet lie. Then had come the cunning artifice of his tongue and the divisive, possessive throb of his cock, both in her curious mouth and between her greedy legs. Each lesson had been sweeter and headier than the next, and he had been a patient, ardent teacher, always laughing, always guiding. He stupefied her, and to this day, she was still intoxicated by the sensation of sticky, cooling dampness on her thighs and the briny scent of mingled arousal.

Even after five years of marriage and seven years in his bed, she had never wearied, never grown complacent. This wordless communication between them had a thousand permutations, each familiar and yet unique. There was always a new discovery to be made, a new facet to the ritual that had previously gone unnoticed. This time, it was the ceaseless thrum and ripple of energy beneath his skin even as his body was still. It was in his lips, and in his fingers as they curled around her wrist.

She lowered her hand so that their fingers intertwined, and gave a small sigh of satisfaction. The kiss was calm and playful, a lazy duel with no purpose other than physical contact. His free hand slid over the smocked hump of her belly, and she was startled into laughter by a vigorous kick.

"Oh," she gasped when the kiss broke. "That was a good one. He always seems to know when you're there."

"Good," he murmured, his breath warm on her cheek. "I want him to know I'm here." He leaned in and nuzzled the pulse-point of her throat. "I want you to know it, too." He sucked the faintly fluttering skin between his teeth and nipped gently.

The vulnerability in the statement made her heart ache even as her less altruistically-minded body arched into his mouth. She forced herself to focus long enough to run her fingers through his hair.

"You're doing so well, babe," she murmured. "I couldn't have asked for a better father for my children."

He raised his head to look at her. "I just wanna do this right," he said earnestly.

"Honey, there's no set way to do this, no how-to manual. The only thing people can agree on is how to make the baby."

His eyes darkened. "Yeah, well. There's definite ways not to do it, too."

"Your father?" she said before she could stop herself. _Shit._

His father had always been a sore subject, one best left untouched. Christmases spent in the company of his parents were fraught with tension, and sometimes, he held her hand so tightly beneath the table that her eyes watered, and in the morning, her knuckles would be ringed with bruises. He went for his mother's sake, tried to be the good son and fill the space at the table meant for two, and he looked at his father as little as he could.

She didn't know the origin of the hostility between father and son, though she had her suspicions. She could only keep her head down and mouth shut while the tension seethed around the turkey like botulism, and when they finally came home, she'd listen to him bring up dinner in the bathroom. She never asked him if he was all right when he came out because she knew he wasn't. She just let him pretend everything was fine, and when he came to her in the middle of the night, pressing his broad, solid body against the back of her small, fragile one, she turned into him and whispered nonsense words of comfort until his grip grew slack and his breathing deepened.

He stiffened and pulled away from her, and her body mourned the abrupt coolness where his flesh had been. "You want somethin' to eat?" he asked stiffly, and rose from the bed. "I can cut you some fruit."

"Honey, I-,"

"Apples. I'll cut you a couple of Washington Reds." He picked up the bag of fruit.

"All right, babe. Thanks."

He puttered around the room for a while, inspecting the apples for the choicest, cleanest ones, washing them in the bathroom sink, and peeling them with his pocket knife. He was coring one when he said, "So, your roommate at Trinity says you were thinkin' of namin' Junior for me." He spared her the briefest of glances before returning his concentration to the knife in his hand.

"Blabbermouth." She stroked her belly. "Yes, I am."

"You're thinkin' it, or you're going to?"

"I want to."

The knife froze. "Don't."

She blinked. Don had never used that tone with her before. "Is that an order, Captain?" she snapped.

"Ye-no." His shoulders slumped. "No. I just don't think it's a good idea, is all." The knife tip peeled the apple like the excision of a wound.

"Why not? It's a good name. God knows I've enjoyed screaming it over the years. Why not give another lucky girl the same chance someday?"

He did not smile. "I just don't want him thinkin' he has to live up to some impossible standard. It's not fair to a kid."

"Who said he had to? He can high-step on Broadway for all I care. Just because he carries your name doesn't mean he has to be saddled with everything else. A name only has as much power as you want to give it."

"I just don't want him named after me, Rebecca," he said flatly.

"Why? Because it's your father's name, too?"

He flinched.

"Jesus Christ, Don. Your father has nothing to do with this. He might if we were discussing Mendelian genetics, but we're not, so he doesn't."

"I never said he did," he countered.

"You didn't have to. And since when have you been using perp logic?"

"That's not fuckin' fair."

She sighed. "Look. This baby his nothing to do with your father. We made him. We and God. I don't want to name him for you so he can be a cop. I want to name him for you because I want the whole world to know where the best parts of him came from."

"Then you should be namin' him after you." He finished slicing her apple and brought it to her on a paper towel from the bathroom. "Eat your apple. I'm goin' for a walk." He pressed a kiss to her forehead.

"Babe-,"

"I won't be long, I promise."

What else could she do but let him go? He was back forty-five minutes later, subdued but bristling beneath the skin, and she watched him pace restlessly around the room and smooth imaginary creases from her blankets. Eventually, he plucked an apple from the bag and ate it in long, contemplative chews. Juice beaded on his lower lip, and she longed to kiss it away. She leaned as far out of the bed as she dared, and her lips grazed the side of his mouth.

He never stopped chewing, but his hand slipped into hers, and the ball of his thumb stroked the back of her hand in slow, patient circles while he watched the afternoon sun through the window.


	7. And the Hour Was None

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

Labor wasn't as horrifying as he had expected it to be. He had anticipated grunting and swearing and convulsive sheet- and hand-clutching, but here in the early stages, Rebecca was remarkably calm. Every nine minutes or so, she would close her eyes, take a deep, shuddering breath, and groan. He could see her belly tightening and releasing in the grip of each contraction, and when the pain reached its zenith, she would tilt her head back to expose her pale throat, and whimper.

"You okay?" he asked anxiously for the third time in as many minutes, and stroked her forehead.

"I think," she panted, "that getting him out is going to be harder than it was putting him in."

"I don't know," he said. "I thought I was pretty hard, myself."

"Shut up," she muttered, and swatted him on the shoulder, but she was smiling.

That was good, because he was terrified for her. He had always known she was small, but her air of mulish defiance had provided her with an armor tough as steel and adamant and had added depth and breadth to wasted muscle and scrawny sinew. But the first contraction had peeled the armor away and exposed her fragility, and it occurred to him with the clarity of a roundhouse slap that his fine-boned, one hundred-twenty-pound wife was charged with the Herculean task of pushing something larger than a five-pound bag of flour from an orifice that usually accommodated his penis with the snuggest of fits. It was enough to turn him green.

_What did you think was going to happen? _his mother demanded, waspish and shrill. _Did you think her swelling stomach was the result of maternal joy, and that the baby was going to be delivered by the blue-capped Vlasic Pickle Stork? You know better, Don, or you should. Your father and I didn't raise you to live in a dream-world. This is the real world, and in the real world, women give birth painfully, as penance for Original Sin. Or don't you remember that from catechism class?_

Yes, he did remember. He remembered the hard, wooden seats and the stuffy, still air and the itchy prickle of his starched collar. And he also recalled wanting to be a good boy and wait until marriage to Do It, but he also remembered being sixteen and in the backseat of Mr. DeLuca's Chrysler, wondering how something that felt so good could be so wrong in the eyes of a just and loving God. Reality was subjective, and the "right" way had a nasty way of turning on its ear.

When he was a kid, his mother had told him and his sister that children were gifts from God, and that they should always be loved and protected, and he had believed it without question because in his parents' home, that had been true. Sure, Pop wasn't around a lot when he and Diana were growing up, but he kept food on the table and clothes on their backs, and he'd never done more than spank them.

_Until the night your sister died. He came to that house and saw his little girl lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Then he turned around and laid your bottom lip open with his knuckles. It was the last time he ever touched you, and every now and then, you still taste blood in your mouth like melting snow._

He pushed the thought away. This wasn't about his mother, his father, or his baby sister, God rest her innocent soul. This was about his wife and how babies came into the world. She groaned again, and he squeezed her hand in silent encouragement.

His mother had told him that children were to be cherished, and he had carried that belief with him onto the force, where it had broken his heart. The mother inside his head claimed that he hadn't been raised in a dream-world, but she was a liar. He _had _been weaned on the dreams of playing fair and protecting the weak, had cut his teeth on the notion of heroes and villains and a clear line of demarcation between the two. Heroes were always heroes, and villains were always villains, and never the twain shall meet.

Then he'd hit the streets with Gavin Moran, and all of his candied ideals had disintegrated like sugar exposed to water. Clean-cut businessmen who donated millions to charity and held gala balls for causes celebres fucked thirteen-year-old girls from Thailand in the backseat of their limousines and left them bleeding and alone in trash-strewn allies. Doctors raped patients under anesthesia, and hookers society considered trash saved kids from being stuck by cars. The border between black and white was grey, and human beings weren't books to be judged by their covers, but prisms that projected a different light depending on the angle at which they were held.

And children were not viewed as gifts from God. That had been the most egregious lie of all. Children were trash to be discarded when the novelty of reproduction had faded, beaten and starved and locked in airless basements infested with rats. They were forgotten, abandoned, and left to fend for themselves on the heartless streets of the city. He and Gavin had often seen them during patrols, scurrying from alley to alley in wary, feral packs, jostling and yipping and fighting for dominance. He would see them in the dead of winter, flitting behind the dunes of snow and mounded trash, slat-thin and breathing smoke as they dodged the lights of the patrol car and the looming threat of days spent in the cheerless confines of a CPS bunker.

They were pawns in divorces and resented souvenirs of love gone sour, and he had gone into apartments and found them bloodied, bruised, broken, and dead, facedown in toilets and on griddles, skin charred and sizzling. He'd found them sitting on the floor and playing with the dog while their parents stiffened and bloated in the bedroom. He'd pulled them from dumpsters and sewer grates and riverbanks, and the city had buried them in paupers' graves with numbers instead of names on the markers. So if anyone could be accused of living in a world of sugarplums and fairy dust, it was his mother.

He hadn't thought his child would come from a stork or magically sprout from a dew-bespattered cabbage patch. He had known about the birds and the bees since he was nine, and by the time he was thirteen, he'd been looking forward to doing his part for the cause. But he had hoped that modern medicine, which had found a way to keep octogenarians in the saddle, would have devised a gentler way to usher him into the world, one that wouldn't require a blood sacrifice from his tiny, fierce mother.

_That is the way of the world, my good Donnie boy, _said his aunt, Lucia. _Nothing good ever comes without a price. We have been paying that blood tribute since Adam, earned the right to be called mother by virtue of the blood smeared on our trembling, sweating thighs. It is the tears and the pain of childbirth that forges the bond between mother and child. Once you have paid for your child in sweat and blood and screams, you will not surrender them under threat of death, and even if death comes for you, the child will have to be pried from your cold, stiff fingers._

_Don't you worry about your girl, my Donnie boy. She is stronger than she looks, and she will do what needs to be done. She's gonna have your boy, and she's gonna be around to raise him. She'll make a good mama. She'll make sure he's fed and warm and clean, and you won't ever have to worry about coming home to find him eating stale Cheerios from the box because she decided motherhood was too hard. She'll see it through until he's a good, strong man. It's gonna be all right, my Donnie boy. You'll see. You just trust your Aunt Lucia. Very soon now, you're gonna have a family._

He imagined Rebecca holding a wriggling, blue-blanketed bundle to her breast and grinned. Rebecca reached out to tickle his temple with cool fingers.

"What's on your mind? You look entirely too pleased with yourself."

He blushed. "Naw. I just can't believe it's finally happenin'."

She surveyed him shrewdly. "So you're not gloating over the fact that your sacred winkie worked?" Amused and decidedly skeptical.

He shook his head. "I've been doin' that since you brought me the EPT. 'Sides, the real moment for male gloatin' comes after the baby is born and I get to run out into the hallway, crammin' cigars into everybody's mouth and pretendin' it ain't a subliminal 'eat me, 'cause mine worked first.'"

She laughed. "Have I told you lately how much I love your balls-out honesty? Ow." She grimaced as another contraction gripped her.

"You okay?" he asked. It was a helpless reflex.

Just then, there was a rap on the door, and Dr. Fiorello entered. "Hello, my bella dama. Let's see how things are coming along in here, mm?" He smiled and pulled a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of his white coat.

Rebecca eyed the gloves dubiously. "You're going to stick your fingers into my plumbing again, aren't you?" she said peevishly.

Dr. Fiorello chuckled as he snapped the gloves over his wrists. "I'm afraid so," he confessed. "But I'll be as quick as I can."

He approached the bed, and Flack saw her entire body tense. Her legs, which had been lying limply beneath the covers, drew up and together, and her fingers fisted in the sheets.

"C'mon doll," Don soothed. "Let him check."

"Every time he pokes his fingers in there, my uterus attempts to detach itself and rampage down Wall Street," she complained.

"It's your body's attempt to expel foreign objects that might block your baby's passage through the birth canal. It's perfectly natural."

"Natural or not, it hurts."

"Yes, I know. It's the only way to see how well you're dilating." He drew back the covers and coaxed her locked knees apart. He made to slip his fingers into her, and she resisted with a grunt. "Rebecca," he said patiently.

"You gotta let him do it, doll," Don urged.

She scowled at him, but relaxed, and Fiorello's fingers disappeared inside her. "Mmm hmm," he murmured in that maddening doctor tongue that could mean anything from all was well to imminent calamity. Rebecca swore under her breath and kept her gaze fixed on his face.

He felt a pang of jealousy as he watched the old doctor explore her cervix. It was ridiculous, of course; the old man was just doing his job and making sure that things were going like they should, but the feeling persisted.

_She's mine, _he thought. _Just like Junior is mine. She gave herself to me after a baseball game one August night, and a year and a half later, she sealed the deal at the altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral. I'm the only one that's ever touched her there, and I'm the only one who's ever gonna. _

She had confessed that she was inexperienced, but he hadn't realized just how innocent she was until he'd bedded her that August night and felt the elastic resistance of her hymen against the eager, nudging head of his prick. He should have guessed, he supposed, given her wide-eyed reaction to midnight necking in his car, but he'd assumed her goggle-eyed incredulity stemmed from her stunned nervous system and its efforts to keep pace.

He'd offered to stop when he felt the sudden graze of her maidenhead, but she'd shaken her head and stubbornly tightened her grip, and there had been nothing for it but to press forward as gently as he dared. She'd stiffened and cried out, sharp and startled, and then she'd relaxed by degrees, lulled by the motion of his body.

_You couldn't have stopped even if you wanted to. Your will was weak, and the need to possess was strong, intoxicatin'. She was wet heat and shuddering tightness, and higher brain function had shorted out beneath the flood of testosterone._ _And let's face it, it was an ego boost to know that you were the first to set foot on that particular piece of sacred real estate, to be offered it. It was proof that she could walk the walk even if she couldn't walk anywhere else, that she trusted you as much as she claimed._

_There was blood afterward, stippled on the sheets, and lookin' at it, you were filled with a perverse mixture of pride and shame. Ashamed because blood meant pain, and the last thing you ever wanted was to hurt her, but proud because it was the formless signature of an unspoken contract. The vows you'd take eighteen months later were a formality; the real bindin' took place in that bed. But you didn't know how to say somethin' like that without soundin' like a spineless, pussy dumbass, and anyway, she didn't look like she wanted to talk. She was lyin' in the rumpled sheets with her legs still open, blinkin' and lickin' her lips._

_She was ginger when she got up long enough to help you change the sheets, and she winced whenever her thighs rubbed together, but when you asked her if she was all right, she nodded, and when you climbed back into bed, she draped herself around you like a curling wisteria vine and went to sleep._

_It was rough on her the next few times, but just when you started to worry she might not be able to handle it, the dam burst and she came so hard it startled you. After that, it was your pleasure to teach her about all the fun that could be had between the sheets. She was eager to learn and smart, a blank slate to be tattooed with whatever suited you. She was a quick study, and since you didn't have to worry about livin' up to previous expectations, there was no pressure to be better than the last guy. You could do it because you liked to do it. Your girl was up for anything once, and if she was adamant about what she didn't like, she'd happily scream down the walls on behalf of what she did._

_Sex was the one part of her you didn't have to share. The world saw her genius every day, but nobody else saw her naked and wanton and glistening with sweat and water. No one else knew what the warm, puckered flesh of her nipples tasted like, or the tart sweetness of her pussy, the salt and lime of a margarita. No one else was privy to the way her eyes and hips rolled in unison as she came. It was a great and secret show just for you._

_But lately, everybody and their brother has been waltzin' in here to have a look at what's been marked _For Your Eyes Only _for all these years. Doctors, nurses-they all saunter into the room, lift up the sheets, and peer at her like she was an interestin' sculpture. Ever since she went into labor this mornin, people have been glovin' up and prospectin' in her delicates like it was some frat initiation game. It's rude as fuck, and all she can do is lie there and take it, and from the look on her face, I'd say she wasn't too thrilled with it._

Rebecca was still staring at him, gritting her teeth against the unwanted intrusion of Dr. Fiorello's fingers. Her eyes were dull and blank, whitewashed windows in a vacant storefront, and the glint of her teeth was strangely predatory in the light. It made him profoundly uneasy, and he reached out to stroke her thin forearm.

"Rebecca?"

"Don't touch me." Conversational and disturbingly mechanical, but underpinned by an ominous menace he could not name.

He withdrew his hand, hurt and inexplicably afraid of his tiny, helpless wife.

_She ain't helpless, and you know it, _Gavin muttered. _She never was. She laid open that asswipe Malfoy's throat with a point of her finger and a nonchalant flick of her wrist. You've watched that little mind-movie in your head a million times, and you've wondered the same thing every time: How deep does it go? How far? What could she do if she really set her mind to it? It's not a question you like to consider for too long because it leads you down avenues you don't wanna pursue, twisted back alleys where Stephen King's aborted imaginary children have taken up residence among the mold and rat shit. It makes you think of Carrie and Charlie McGee and The Shop, and those are the stuff of nightmares._

Dr. Fiorello finally removed his fingers, and despite her earlier admonition not to touch her, she grabbed his hand and squeezed as the resultant contraction came. She cried out and arched off the mattress in a desperate effort to relieve the pressure. She was trying to breathe through the pain, but the cramp seemed to have temporarily stymied her diaphragm because the exhalation came in a rattling wheeze.

"It's all right," Don ventured, and when there was no immediate remonstrance, he brought her knuckles to his lips and kissed them.

Dr. Fiorello came around the foot of the bed and reached for a nearby chair. "Well, now, my bella dama, you seem to be progressing nicely. You're only at three centimeters, but things should speed up once your water breaks. If that doesn't happen within the next hour or so, I'd like to puncture it to move things along. I thought we might discuss-."

Rebecca cut him off with the cruel efficiency of a slap. "You're going to leave now," she said.

Fiorello paused in the act of straddling the chair, ass hovering uncertainly over the seat. "Excuse me?"

"You're going to leave now," she repeated in that same dead voice, and the hackles rose on the back of Don's neck.

_It's like bein' in that city behind the wall again, _he thought. _Like walkin' under power lines and feelin' the rattle and hum in your teeth. It smells like lightnin' and feels like swamp heat, and it's comin' from my wife._

"I know you're tired, bella dama," Fiorello countered reasonably. "It's been a long nine months. But we have to talk about-,"

"I don't have to do anything," she snapped coldly. "And you know nothing. This was not your child to carry. There will be no epidural, no TENS device, no soothing bullshit quacking from you or anybody else. You will turn around and leave this room, and you will not come back to stick your fingers in my twat for one hour."

_This is who she is underneath, who she was before love softened her. This is the girl she was telling me about after she killed Draco Malfoy, the one who led fourteen of her friends to death and never looked back. This is the hard, pitiless core beneath that soft, cool skin, the part of her that crawled over bones and broken bodies with a straight face and dry eyes. _

_And that is what will protect your Junior for the rest of her days, _pointed out Aunt Lucia.

He was not comforted by the thought. Her eyes were flat, reptilian as they watched Dr. Fiorello ponder the sudden change in her demeanor, and he sensed the simmering bloodlust behind her inscrutable face. She wanted to level the playing field, hurt someone as much as she had been hurt over the past weeks and months, and Dr. Fiorello's white coat made him the perfect target.

"Hey, give us a few, huh, doc?" Don said. "I think she needs some time." _And I don't wanna see your blood splattered all over the walls. I'm still tryin' to expunge Malfoy's dramatic exit from the mental record books._

Dr. Fiorello nodded. "I'll be back in one hour. You'll call me if anything changes-if her water breaks or if the contractions get harder or more frequent?"

"Absolutely."

Dr. Fiorello patted Rebecca's bony shin. "It will be all right, bella dama. You'll see." He left, and his white coat whispered against the smooth wood of the door as he disappeared, as though it were sharing a secret.

"What's the matter?" he asked when the door closed.

"I'm tired," she said, and stroked her belly.

He ran his fingers through his hair. "I know you are, doll. But you knew he was gonna have to come out eventually."

"I want him to come out," she shouted, and pounded a fist into the mattress. "I have been counting the days until he came out and I could count his fingers and toes and pee on my own schedule again. I want him out of me more than you possibly imagine. I'm tired of being scared and helpless and sore. I want people to stop backing me into a corner and treating me like I'm a turkey that needs to be fucking stuffed. I'm fat and pregnant and scared of what's happening to me, and I want everybody to go away and leave me alone." She stopped, panting, and then she burst into tears.

He scrambled onto the bed and wrapped her in his arms from behind, her back nestled against his sternum. She tried to turn into him, but her bulk was too ponderous, and she only succeeded in shifting her hips a few degrees.

"I used to fight werewolves and vampires, and now I'm a doctor's Roto Rooter training tool," she sobbed.

"I-werewolves?" It was the only reply of which he was capable.

She nodded. "Uh huh. Silver."

"I thought they were make-believe."

"Every fairy tale in the Muggle world is a reality in mine. Werewolves, vampires, unicorns, thestrals. I fought the former and admired the latter, and now…" The rest was lost in a sob.

_In mine. _So she still considered herself, however remotely, a part of the world beyond the wall.

He mouthed the nape of her neck. "I-," he began. "Is-are you happy here? With me?"

The sobbing stopped abruptly. "What?" she croaked.

He shrugged. "I don't know. I just thought if you weren't, maybe we could move somewhere else, try livin' beyond the wall."

She shook her head. "No, we couldn't. There aren't any TVs or computers in Wizarding New York. The first time you couldn't watch the Rangers, you'd go on a shooting spree. Besides, you're a New York cop, and you couldn't be that anywhere but here."

"That why you turn down all those job offers you get?"

"How did you-?"

"I went lookin' for you at your office. It was stupid, but it was all I could think to do after that orderly told me to go where the magic was. I mean, numbers are magic to you, right?" He mouthed her neck again. "Guess I didn't want to think'a the other kind."

"You went to my office? What'd you think?"

"How come you didn't tell me about all those awards on your wall?"

Now it was her turn to shrug. "Didn't think you'd find it particularly interesting. All you missed out on was some spectacularly dry chicken breast and overcooked asparagus." She sniffled.

"There was a dinner?"

"The annual faculty dinner where those awards are handed out. There are lots of dry speeches, and the tenured professors get totally wasted on wine and pass out in their chocolate mousse. There's usually a fistfight between a couple members of the history or philosophy departments, and everybody goes home before campus security shows up to bust heads."

"It gets that crazy at those things?"

"Dweebs in Tweeds Gone Wild, babe."

"Still, the next time you get one of those job offers, we should at least talk about it."

"No," she answered implacably. "Nothing to consider."

"I just don't want you feelin' trapped 'cause of me, is all."

"What are you talking about?" she demanded incredulously. "The seven years I've known you have been the best of my life. I'm just tired and overwhelmed at the thought of being someone's mother. Besides, I want Junior to grow up here. I didn't carry him for nine months just to miss out on snowball fights in front of the building, skating in Central Park, or his first trip to Yankee Stadium."

"Would it have been easier for you if we'd had him in one of those magic places?"

She shifted against him. "I don't know. Maybe. I can tell you that the Wizarding world has some really righteous drugs. I never thought about it, and the staff at the school never volunteered. People just…had babies. Mrs. Weasley had seven, and she was fit as a fiddle. Or she was, until the Dementors came for her." Distant, lost to memory.

"Dementors?"

"Soul vampires." She did not elaborate. "Anyway, she was a squat fireplug of a woman, and every one of her children had red hair. Only three of them left now. The rest are dead."

He struggled for something to say. "I-,"

"You worry too much about wizarding magic. It's not the only kind, you know, or the best."

"Yeah? What other kinds are there?"

She rested his hand on her belly and covered it with her own. "This kind."

It was such a simple, obvious answer, and he laughed. Rebecca was good like that. She could always find the simplest answer even when it was trapped beneath layers of complicated emotional curlicues. She enjoyed the sunset for the colors it painted on the fading canvas of the sky, and she hated murderers because they existed. The simplicity was what had drawn him to her and made him fall head-over-heels in love. She loved because she loved and hated because she hated, and she apologized for neither.

She groaned as another contraction seized her, and he felt the tension in the small of her back as his son made his way toward the world by painstaking, agonizing millimeters.

"I'm scared," she said quietly.

He slipped his hand between their bodies and kneaded the knot of muscle in her back. "It's fine to be scared," he murmured. "But you just remember that I'm right here, and I ain't gonna let nothin' happen to you."

"Promise?" Small, a child seeking reassurance that the creeping shadows were only nerves and imagination.

"I swear, Rebecca. I swear on my sister's grave." It was the most solemn promise he could make.

They didn't talk much after that. The next time she spoke to him, she would be begging him to let her push, goddammit, let her push because it hurt so bad and she couldn't breathe. Shortly after the invocation of his private ghost, Dr. Fiorello returned, and this time, she listened quietly. She refused pain medication and the draconian needle that would have provided it a second time, and there was nothing else to do but wait.

Her water broke in a sudden, hot gush a few hours later, and the pain increased exponentially. She was no longer quiet when they struck, but gasped and moaned and writhed until they passed, hands clawed in the bedsheets even as he struggled to hold them. He fed her ice chips when she could accept them and sponged the sweat from her face and neck. Sometimes she wanted to be held when the pain came, and burrowed into him to ride out the spasm. Other times, she twisted away from him and rocked to and fro, but always her eyes bulged with anguished surprised, as if nothing could be so horrible as the cramp in her belly. Until the next one.

Hour after hour it went, and she dilated by degrees. Four, five, six centimeters. Fiorello came often to check her progress, and each time he thrust his fingers into her, she bucked and howled at the intrusion. He could only watch helplessly as she endured. He was useless now. There was nothing he could do for her but offer meaningless words of comfort that were drowned out by her screams.

_Your job was over the minute you planted that seed in her belly. All that talk about you bein' a part of this was just window dressin' to soothe your ego. This has been her road-and hers alone-since the beginnin'. She's the one who's been pukin' and achin' and losin' her dignity inch by inch. She's been feedin' him and soothin' him and leachin' the calcium from her bones to make his. She's the one who has to bring him into the world now. It's all up to her. You're just along for the ride._

Stella came at seven centimeters and never left. He supposed she'd stopped by in the hopes of getting Rebecca's statement, but Rebecca was incapable of speech. She could only scream and pant and groan.

"Oh. Oh, my God," Stella said, frozen in the doorway. "I'm sorry, Flack. I had no idea… I'll just leave you two alone." She turned to go.

"Stel," Flack said desperately. "Don't go. I mean, you don't have to if you don't want to."

"I don't think-,"

"Stay," Rebecca wheezed. "I could use another friendly face."

"All right, then." Stella came into the room and sat down.

Hawkes showed up at eight centimeters and promptly offered to scrub in. Flack declined, but Hawkes hovered in the hallway, always on the periphery of his vision. Rebecca was pleading with him and Dr. Fiorello to let her push, but the old doctor just shook his head and told her to resist the urge a little longer.

"Honey, please," she pleaded, and arched off the bed. "I need to push."

He could only stroke her sweating face and beg her to hang in there. It was Stella who distracted her, with Greek profanity and dirty jokes.

Finally, sixteen hours after labor began over her morning grapefruit, Dr. Fiorello nodded and pulled a stool to the foot of the bed. "All right, my bella dama," he murmured. "Now we are going to make you a bella mama, eh?" He chuckled. "Detective, you get behind your girl and brace her, mmm?"

Flack toed off his shoes and climbed into the bed, gently slipping behind her and supporting her back with his chest.

"Good. Now, slip your forearms behind her knees and hold them up and apart."

"I'm not sure she bends that way, doc," he said dubiously. He was alarmed to find that his arms were shaking.

"Do the best you can."

He did as he was told and stopped when muscles locked against him.

"All right, now, my bella dama," Dr. Fiorello said. "We're going to push now, and your young policeman, he is going to count to ten. Ready? Push."

"1…2…3…4…5…"


	8. Welcome to the World, Boy of Mine

Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

**A/N: **The End. No more. No direct sequels, though there are more stories in the continuity. Thank you to everyone who read, but especially to those who left a word or two in kind.

It was quiet after the tumult of his son's birth. Rebecca was sleeping the sleep of the triumphant and just, and he brushed a strand of hair from her nose. She was more haggard than he would have liked, too drawn, but he guessed she had a right to be after her long ordeal. He bent and kissed her pale lips.

"You done good," he murmured. "You done so good."

He had told her the same when it was over and his squalling, bloody son was lying on her heaving stomach, and she had looked at him, hair in sweating, clumpy, haggles on her scalp and eyes smudged with exhaustion. Her mouth had opened to ask him a question, but her trembling lips had lacked the strength to form it, and in the end, she'd simply let her head loll against the pillow.

She hadn't needed to ask. Not really. Her eyes had spoken for her, bloodshot and streaming with tears of pain and exertion. _Is he all right? Is he what you wanted? Did I do it right?_

_And what could you say to that? Nothin'. For all the poets' tweetin' about the power of words, sometimes they fail you. They stick in throats and lodge in guts or get lost in translation. They lose meaning if you use 'em too often. You've told vics and their families _I'm sorry for your loss _so many times that you don't even know what it means anymore. It passes from your lips like breath, bitter and stale. _

_So what could you say, standin' over your wife, who had just delivered the rest of your life? The contractions had nearly torn her apart in the end, and just before the baby's head and shoulders crowned and stretched the sensitive skin of her vagina to the breaking point, she bowed on the bed, threw back her head, and shrieked. Not screamed, shrieked, a mindless, animal wail that reverberated in your ears. It was an orgasm in reverse, pain instead of pleasure, and it made your heart thud painfully against your ribcage. _

_Your son was borne into the world on a scream and a torrent of blood, amniotic fluid, and a white substance that reminded you of the seed that had made him, and she was asking you if it was enough with her blood smeared on her thighs in a primitive offering to the gods. It was absurd and terrible and staggering, and your emotional reserves were spent. So you pressed your forehead to hers and did the only thing you could: You cried._

_Not much. Your father raised no pussies-not even the child born with one-but the tears came all the same, hot and stinging with salt, and mingled with the sweat on her face. You were afraid that Stella might see and think you'd lost your balls, but she was too busy admirin' the fruits of Rebecca's labor and checkin' her fingers for breaks to notice. The only other person who might'a cared was Dr. Fiorello, and he was busy workin' the placenta loose and inspectin' your girl for tears or signs of hemorrhage. _

You done good, _you told her. _You done so good, _and she relaxed._

_There were so many other things you wanted to tell her, like _I love you, _but you couldn't. Not because the words had lost all meaning, but because they carried too much. They were too big for your mouth, too freighted with the emotion of the moment, and they nestled against your heart like a caul. You were afraid that the effort of trying to bring them out would shatter you like frozen glass, so you kept your mouth shut and watched your son squirm on his mother's belly, hands fisted and mouth open in a toothless, furious gape._

_He was impossibly loud for such a tiny creature, all lungs and wrinkle-faced outrage, but you thought it was the sweetest sound you'd ever heard. It meant he was healthy, and you could see his pink, wriggling limbs and tiny fingers and toes. He was naked and dirty and absolutely perfect. Except for his head, which was elongated from his trip through the birth canal, but Dr. Fiorello promised that it was only temporary._

_A nurse wrapped him in a warm towel, and then Rebecca was reaching for him, pulling him towards her breast. It took him a minute to find it, and he rooted noisily until he found her swollen nipple. Then the only sound was your Junior suckling, hands tucked beneath his chin and feet kicking dreamily._

He's a good, strong boy, _Dr. Fiorello said, and smiled. _We'll weigh him in a minute, but I'd guess he's eight pounds or so. You want to cut the cord?

_It took you a minute to realize he meant the umbilical cord that still attached him to the placenta. _It won't hurt him?

_Dr. Fiorello shook his head. _Not a bit. If he screams, it's because he'd rather be with Mama.

_So you cut the cord. And Junior did scream. It was shrill and accusatory, and you wondered if Dr. Fiorello lied to you about it hurtin' him. You wanted to pick him up and cradle him, tell him you were sorry, but before you could, he was whisked away to be weighed and measured and prodded, and the more he screamed, the more upset you got. You were supposed to be protectin' him, and here he was, twenty minutes old and screamin' for somebody to get these strangers away from him. You were tempted to clear the goddamn room with badge and gun, but you held yourself together for Rebecca's sake._

_They took him to the nursery for observation, and when they brought him back a few hours later for his first full feeding, the bottoms of his feet were coated in black ink, as though he'd been sentenced and booked to life without parole while he was gone._

The eight pounds and four ounces of his son were beside the bed in a plastic bassinet. The nursing staff had dressed him in a diaper and a little blue knit cap and covered him with a thin cotton blanket with dancing bears on it, and he was sleeping snugly. The nurses had tried to take him back to the nursery after the feeding under the pretense that Rebecca needed rest, but he had steadfastly refused. He'd raised such a fuss that Dr. Fiorello had come to investigate, and after assessing the situation, he'd instructed the nurses to leave the baby where he was.

"I can take care of you," he told the baby. "I'm your father. 'S my job."

He could, too. He'd been taking care of New York City since he was twenty-one years old, and before that, he'd taken care of his baby sister. He'd taught her how to brush her teeth and tie her shoes, and one day a week, his ma had slept in and let him fix her breakfast. He'd walked her to school and beaten up bullies who messed with her in the play yard and told his father about guys who looked at her funny in the park. He'd done all of that as a child, with nothing but his wits and his fists, so what kind of man would he be if he couldn't do the same for his son with a gun and a badge?

_Except you didn't do so hot when you get right down to it, _sneered a pernicious voice inside his head. _I mean, she's dead now instead of here with you. If you'd been half as good as you think you are, she'd be here, cooin' over the fruit of your loins and snappin' pictures, not sleepin' under the sod in Mount Pleasant and visitin' you in dreams. You missed a stepped there, hero. And so did she. All the way down to the bottom of the staircase with the snap, crackle, pop of snappin' neck._

_And while we're on the subject, your track record as city supercop ain't exactly perfect. Yeah, you've busted perverts and skels and murderers, but for every one you catch, five more scuttle back to the sewers like the cockroaches they are. Maybe ten. How many times have you gotten there too late to do anything but take statements and squeegee brains off the floor? How many times have you rescued hookers from their pimps, only to see 'em back on the street with the same asshole three days later, sportin' a fresh shiner and too much makeup?_

_It's a losin' battle, protectin' people. If you can't save people who should know better, how the hell you think you can save somebody who doesn't? You think it's gonna be easier just because he's yours? You think that just because that screamin' lump of DNA is yours, God's gonna care more? I got news for you, buddy. God abdicated His throne a long time ago, and we're all on our own. If He hadn't you wouldn't be pullin' kids outta storm drains with their heads caved in and their underpants stuffed into their mouths._

He looked at his sleeping baby in the clear, plastic shelter of the bassinet. It was tempting to leave him there forever, sheltered from the predators of the world by the clean, inflexible walls. He would grow up never knowing fear or hurt or pain, and neither he nor his mother would ever have to wonder where he was or if he was all right. He would be eternally perfect and unbruised.

_You can't do that, kid,_ Gavin reasoned gently. _You gotta let 'em go sometime, let 'em get dirty. They'll hate you if you don't. Besides, kids deserve to get mud between their toes and squat over bugs on the sidewalk and get their fingers sticky with meltin' ice cream in the summer. They need to play with dogs and go to ballgames with their old men. The ballgame you went to with your old man is the best memory you have of him, and even if that ain't sayin' much, it was made all the sweeter for the bitterness that came after it. Kids need to be tempered if they're gonna appreciate what they got._

"I just don't wanna fuck this up, Gav. Not this." His voice was ragged and not quite steady.

_Everybody fucks up, kid. It's just a question of how bad. Your Junior there is lucky 'cause he's got two parents that love him and each other very much. That's better than all the smarts and money in the world. You keep your eyes on that, and you got a better than average shot of makin' it out okay. Look at what me an' Andrea managed with the girls before it all went tits-up 'cause I couldn't keep it in my pants. We raised good girls and gave 'em a good future. And look what happens when you don't._

He meant Hector, of course, the bastard son who wore the stain of a cop with none of the perks. He and Gavin had never discussed Hector, not even after the dirty secret was out, but he suspected that Gavin hadn't exactly been doting Daddy to a barrio kid in drooping diapers, not when he had Andrea and his girls at home. Fifteen minutes here and there, maybe five minutes on Christmas Eve before he went home to his tinsel-shining tree and his giggling girls. Just enough to poison the kid against cops and make him see eating his morning bacon as an act of cannibalism.

_Ain't that about what you got? Your Pop'd stand at the kitchen table long enough to bolt a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and then he'd ruffle your hair and kiss your sister's forehead and leave, gone until long after you were in bed. Christmas Eve, he dressed up and herded the family to midnight Mass, awkward and handsome in his dress blues. Your Ma was so proud of him then, and so were you, but you hated him, too, because the uniform meant he was untouchable. Candy-cane-sticky fingers might muss the fabric or tarnish the brass buttons. He was a breathin' Nutcracker, beautiful, but wooden inside his clothes._

_Half the time, he wasn't there come Christmas mornin'. It'd be just your Ma underneath the tree, smilin' over the steamin' rim of her coffee cup and hopin' the gaudy wrappin' paper on the presents would distract you from the fact that your father's chair was empty. Except that Diana always_ _noticed. She was a Daddy's girl the first six years of her life, and she was always lookin' for him. The third year in a row that the chair was empty, she quit lookin', and it was you she came to after that. She became a Baba's girl, and you didn't mind. In fact, you were secretly proud, and you did your best to never let her down._

_Until she went ass-over-teakettle down those damn stairs, that is._

He'd been thinking about his old man a lot since his son had screamed his arrival into the beaming face of Dr. Fiorello. He wondered if his father had sat in a room like this one and pondered him as he slept in a bassinet beside his mother's bed. Probably not. He'd probably been back on the beat as soon as the ink was dry on his birth certificate, but it was comforting to think he had something in common with a man who had last loved him when he was sixteen.

His own son's birth certificate was still on the tray table in front of him. The space for his son's name was still blank, as was the space for his signature. Dr. Fiorello had asked Rebecca the baby's name, and he'd braced himself in preparation for hearing his own name come out of her mouth, but she had hesitated. He could see it trembling in the puckered moue of her lips, but what had emerged was, "We haven't decided yet."

_After what she went through to get him here, she should be allowed to name him whatever she damn well pleases. It shouldn't even be an issue._

It shouldn't, but it was. He didn't want his kid growing up like he had, knowing what was expected of him before he could walk. He wanted him to be able to play and imagine himself as anything and everything under the sun; he wanted him to play fireman or teacher or rock star and not have all the joy leeched out of it by the knowledge that it would never come true because his life had already been mapped out for him.

_Just because it's been mapped out for you don't mean it always goes as planned, _Gavin pointed out. _I never intended to fuck around on my wife and have an illegitimate son, but I did. And what about your life? I'm sure your parents figured you and Diana would grow up together. Diana'd be a seamstress or somethin' equally ridiculous, and you'd be a cop, and you'd both have given them grandchildren by now._

_But Diana's dead, and we both know that had she lived, she'd'a followed in your footsteps and been a cop, too. You're on your first child instead of your fourth or fifth, and the woman who gave him to you is the last person you ever expected to love. Your mother ain't thrilled with the arrangement, either. Right now, you're thinkin' that you're gonna wait two or three years before havin' another kid, but it might not work out that way. She might get pregnant again six months from now since neither one of you intends to go back to usin' rubbers. Just because your kid doesn't have your name doesn't mean he won't end up hatin' your guts anyway._

He got up and crossed to the bassinet. His son was on his side, hands tucked beneath his chin. He looked much better now that they had cleaned him up, but he was still pink and wrinkled and impossibly tiny. He looked, Don thought, like a golden raisin with a thyroid problem.

_He's my goddamn golden raisin with a thyroid problem_, he thought possessively, and his hands curled around the side of the bassinet.

He wanted to hold him, but he didn't quite dare. He was afraid to sully him with hands that had broken wrists and drawn blood and left bruises on the bodies of murderers, rapists, and thieves. Hands that could crush had no business handling something so fragile. And yet, he couldn't resist the urge to touch. He stroked the bottom of one small foot.

The baby's eyes flew open, startled, and then he began to wail.

_We're off to a good start,_ he thought morosely.

"Honey, whassamatter?" Rebecca's voice, fuzzy with sleep. "He hungry?"

"Naw," he answered hastily. "I was just-I wanted-I woke him up."

"Oh. Why?"

"I didn't mean to." Defensive, embarrassed. "I just-," He shrugged. "Never mind." He withdrew his hand.

"C'mere." Rebecca sat up and patted the bed beside her.

He came without a word and sat. Rebecca turned onto her side with a grimace and fiddled with the side of the bassinet. The plastic side fell open, and she reached inside for the baby.

"Come here, you," she said, and maneuvered him into her arms by clever and painstaking manipulation of the blanket on which he was lying. "Here," she said, and carefully held her arms out.

He shook his head. "I don't wanna. I might drop him."

"This from the same man whom I have seen balancing a coffee between his knees, a bear claw in one hand, and the steering wheel in the other? Don't give me that bullshit, Don Flack." Then, more gently, "You're not going to hurt him. You're his Daddy."

He mutely held out his arms, and she slid the baby into them. "There now. That big lug is your father," she told the baby, and settled onto her pillows again.

"Hey, buddy," he murmured, and eased against his own pillows. "It's all right now. I got you."

The baby was unimpressed and howled for several more minutes, but eventually, he calmed and squirmed more deeply into the crook of his arm, hand crammed into his toothless mouth.

"That taste good?"

The baby grunted.

He studied him in silent fascination, taking in the minute flawlessness of his fingers and toes, right down to the miniscule fingernails. He had long, dark lashes, and though he couldn't see it underneath the knit cap, he was sure there was dark hair. Wisps of it, anyway. Blue eyes goggled sleepily up at him.

"Whether he's an accountant or a bean farmer, he's going to look like you," Rebecca mused. "You make pretty babies, Detective Flack."

"Yeah?" He couldn't smother a flare of pride at the compliment. "Anyways, I didn't have much to do with it. You did all the grunt work," he said earnestly.

"I couldn't have done it without you."

"Would ya want to?" He had intended it to be glib, but as soon as the words left his mouth, he realized he was terrified of the answer. He fussed uselessly with the baby's blanket and studied his solemn little face.

"Absolutely not." She kissed his bare shoulder. "The end result wouldn't be nearly as good."

He hid his relief in bravado. "Bet your sweet ass, it wouldn't." He gently prodded the baby's palm with his index finger, and the baby gripped it. "Centerfielder all the way."

She giggled. "I think Jeter is safe for the time being. So, what do you want to call our work of art?"

He looked at her. She was sleepy and tousled and beautiful even in her hospital smock. "I thought you wanted to name him Don?"

"I did, but I'm not going to do it if it hurts you that much. I don't want you looking at him every day and seeing something you hate. William's not bad."

"That's got snotty prep school shit all over it."

"Why? His friends would call him Billy."

"Michael is a good name," he offered.

"Mm. I thought of that, too. I don't suppose it matters, since we'll probably end up calling him Junior. It suits him." She yawned. "You don't mind if I go back to sleep? I hurt all over."

"Naw, doll. You sleep. I got him."

"You'll wake me if he gets hungry?"

"Yeah." He leaned in to plant a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth. "Stop worryin'. Please. Lemme take care of you now."

She flashed him a weary smile and sank onto her pillow with a grateful sigh. "I love you."

I_ love you so bad it hurts, _he thought, but it was still too large in his aching throat, so he simply nodded and patted her thigh.

_She's right, you know,_ Gavin muttered. _You could name that kid John Jacob Jingleheimerschmitz, and it wouldn't matter 'cause he's always gonna be Junior to your heart. That's what he's been since you saw that first ultrasound, and he's gonna be that when he's graduatin' from Princeton, crossin' the stage in his cap and gown and smilin' at his ma. No matter how big he gets, you're gonna see him just like this, fresh outta his mama's belly and helpless as the blanket he's wrapped in._

_Who cares if he's got your name or your father's? You got somethin' you parents never had. You got your girl, and she's gonna help you. She'll put her totterin' foot up your ass if you start neglectin' that kid for your job. She can't raise him alone, and I might be an asshole for sayin' so, but her handicap means you can't go so fast that you miss out on what matters. She won't let you._

_You ain't your old man, kid. If you was, you wouldn't'a looked twice at your mighty seated Aphrodite. You're a better man than he ever was, and your kid is gonna turn out better than you._

He looked at the baby, who was sleeping soundly, feet twitching with footsteps not yet taken, and at his wife, who slept with one hand draped over his leg. His family. The one thing in the world that superseded the State of New York in his loyalties, and the one thing for which he would sell his soul.

He pulled the tray table with the birth certificate towards him, picked up the pen the nurse had left, and touched pen to paper. He hesitated for the briefest instant, then wrote his son's name in the space provided. He signed his own name with a flourish and dropped the pen.

_Don Flack, III_ glistened from the space with grave finality, but when he looked at his son, he discovered that Gavin and Rebecca were right. He was still Junior.

"Now that we got that settled, there's a few things I gotta tell you," he told the sleeping baby. "The first thing is, no matter what Messer tries to tell you later, the Mets blow."

He fell asleep that way, with his son in his arms and a thousand thoughts on his lips, and when the duty nurse checked on them a few hours later, she could only smile, shake her head, and close the door behind her.


End file.
